Flat Earth Assumptions of Biblical Authors—Edward T. Babinski VS. Dave Armstrong & J.P. Holding

Dear Dave, Please note that I did not head this article, “Flat Earth Teachings of the Bible,” but “Flat Earth Assumptions of Biblical Authors.” I agree that the question of “Whether the Bible TEACHES the world is flat” is separate from the question of “What the ancient Hebrew writers of the Bible may have thought about the shape of the cosmos.” One can accept all of the prima facia evidence that the ancient Hebrews believed and spoke in terms of a flat earth without necessarily having to believe that the Bible was written in order to “reveal to future mankind” the true shape of the earth. Therefore Evangelicals (like Seely and Walton, mentioned below) as well as Catholic biblical scholars can and will continue to employ the historical approach when it comes to discovering what the Hebrews mostly likely believed about the shape of the cosmos based on their writing in the Bible, and at the same time argue that the Bible might not have been written in order to provide accurate information as to the shape of the cosmos. So we probably agree there.

Flat Earth Assumptions of Biblical Authors

However, one point I wish to add to the above is that IF God allowed ancient naive flat-earth views of the cosmos (as well as views of a “six day creation” of the entire cosmos that revolved around “earth” evenings and morning) to exist in the minds of his ancient followers, what other ideas in the Bible might not also be the result of naiveté rather than truth?

What about the ancient view that animal sacrifices were necessary to appease god(s) for instance? Was that the result of naiveté or eternal truth? Or the idea that “the life was in the blood” instead of being primarily in the brain and nervous system? Might it not have been naiveté that inspired the ancient Hebrews to view the world in terms of “sympathetic magic,” as in the case of their belief that by laying their hands on a goat and then driving the goat into the wilderness, their sins would thus be carried away? (Lev. 16:20-22) Or was it naiveté that inspired the Hebrews to use the SAME word to describe both mildew stains on walls, and leprosy sores on the human body, and in both cases employ a bird to which the priest claimed to transfer such stains and sores, and then let the bird go into the sky to try and make both of those unwanted things likewise go away? (Lev. 14:4-7,48-53) What other beliefs and practices in the Bible might not also be based on naiveté rather than truth? That is my question.

For instance, the Bible has much to say about the all-directing heart of man, his life-blood, and his soul-breath, i.e., the pounding heart, the whistling breath, and the sharp color of blood, together with its lack being a sign of death, attracted the attention of the ancients. While the organ known as “the brain,” a silent unobtrusive organ, was overlooked (see here and here) and therefore not granted the meagerest mention or symbolic association in the Bible, unlike the heart, bowels and kidneys which are all granted symbolic “guiding” mentions. The brain was ignored even when animals were offered up to Yahweh who wanted their hearts, kidneys, bowels and blood, but not their brains. Yet today we know that it is the organ of “the brain” that is our chief directing organ and holds the “life” most precious to us, being the center of our conscious life. All of which goes to prove that the Bible is far from being an authoritative guide to science and/or the authors of the Bible dwelt more on appearances than on scientific facts.

Ancient Near Eastern accounts of creation depicted the heavens (usually curved) above a flat earth, as they appear to the naive eye even today. Even modern day observations by children produce similar results (The Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics conducted a study during the 1980s on the mental sophistication of children and discovered that almost one-half of children aged ten years and younger in the United States and other countries believe the earth is flat. And those who say it is round picture “round” as a giant pancake or a curved sky covering a flat ground. One in four thirteen-year olds also believes the earth is flat.) The blue appearance of the sky may have also prompted the ancients to think in terms of the color of vast waters, and thus be the basis for their belief that the cosmos arose out of primeval waters, and lay in the midst of those same waters with a firm firmament holding back “the waters above.” (And the apostolic fathers right up to Martin Luther believed that was the case, based on words from the Bible.)

Which brings me to your recent reply to a brief online article of mine on flat earth verses in the Bible. (Please note that my most recent and comprehensive paper on the topic, Evolving Interpretations of the Bibleʼs “Cosmological Teachings”—OR—Does the Bible “Teach Science?”)

Please note that our views that not THAT far apart since we both agree that the Bible does not appear to have been written to teach us about modern astronomy, cosmology, geology, or biology. In your case however, you appear to have gone so far as to try to argue (ala J. P. Holding) that the Biblical authors were supernaturally preserved from assuming a single erroneous thing regarding the SHAPE of the cosmos. (What about regarding itʼs CREATION too? Were the authors of the Bible also preserved from assuming or writing down even a single statement that might be erroneous concerning how creation happened? I donʼt suppose youʼre willing to agree with J. P. Holding in making a “six day creation” your fall back assumption, as he does, are you)?

In all kindness, and regardless of what you wrote concerning my views, much of what I wrote about the “flat earth assumptions” of the ancient Hebrews is far from being out of the ordinary in the world of biblical scholarship, so you cannot blame what I wrote on “atheism/agnosticism.” Mainstream scholars, orthodox Catholics, and even Protestant Evangelicals, would agree with what I wrote, and find J. P. Holdingʼs inventive explanations just as unconvincing as I do.

Also, here are some notes on the sources you employed in your attempted “refutation” of what is a mainstream theological view. You employed:

  1. The Concordia Theological Monthly, produced by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a young-earth creationist inerrantist church that teaches “God…created heaven and earth…in the manner and in the space of time recorded in the Holy Scriptures…namely…in six days.”

  2. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, published in 1915. [But why cite only the single article in the above Encyclopedia when there are books that contain information galore on ancient views of the cosmos, even of the Near Eastern cosmos in particular? Have neither Holding nor yourself ever read or heard of such books?]

  3. E. W. Maunder, who was not a theologian but an astronomer born in the mid-1800s.

  4. James Orr, a theologian from the late 1800s who admitted even then that “I [Orr] do not enter into the question of how we are to interpret the third chapter of Genesis—whether as history or allegory or myth, or most probably of all, as old tradition clothed in oriental allegorical dress…” [James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World (1897), p. 185, see also p. 447]

  5. Bernard Rammʼs book, The Christian View of Science and Scripture, published in 1954.

    However, you neglected to mention that after a couple decades Ramm was no longer a progressive creationist as he was when he wrote the book you cited above. In AFTER FUNDAMENTALISM [written in 1983], Rammʼs new approach consisted of recognizing that “If the writers of Holy Scripture are truly children of their cultures, then they express themselves in the terms, concepts, and vocabulary of their culture.” And he agreed with Barth in letting “the Genesis record stand as it is, a product of the prescientific world with its prescientific cosmologies.”

    Ramm even wrote in that same book, “Fundamentalists [inerrantists, et al] do not properly interact with modern learning and thus are condemned to the losing strategy of obscurantism… Evolution, modern geology, scientific anthropology, and biblical criticism are subjected to continuous castigation. The fundamentalist presses do not rest in turning out the literature of obscurantism. Sometimes they do try to make hay out of modern knowledge. Harry Rimmer and a number of others attempted to show that the Scriptures contain anticipations of modern science [and modern cosmology—E.T.B.]. But that solution no longer works. There is also much reliance on the discoveries of modern archeological research but that foundation is laid only by ignoring findings that seem to counter the biblical record.”]

    You also employed the following as an authority:

  6. J. P. Holding, ex-prison librarian, self-styled web-pologist, who does not have a graduate degree in theology, has not pursued a seminary degree, and his self-styled study of the Bibleʼs original languages has been shown to be deficient. What Holding specializes in is inventing imaginative denials of questions raised by far more informed biblical scholars than himself.

    Holdingʼs nemesis is Paul Seely a fellow Evangelical, but one who disagrees with Holding on this issue. Seely cites plenty of experts on the views that the ancients held of the cosmos. Seely knows more about Hebrew, has graduated from a conservative Christian Seminary, and cites biblical scholars galore in his impressive bibliographies that accompanied each of his three articles on the shape of the ancient Hebrew cosmos, all three of which were published in the Westminster Theological Review. See here, and here, and here, for online versions of all three paper, all well worth reading.

    Seely recently had this to add concerning Holdingʼs attempted rebuttals:

    “Holding does not cite even one OT verse as evidence that God had revealed the sphericity of the earth to the Hebrews. Presumably he knows as well as I that there is no such verse in the OT which would stand up to close scrutiny. In fact, Holdingʼs position that the word ‘earth’ in the OT is equivocal implies that the Hebrews did not have a revelation that the earth was spherical. He believes the Hebrews could read the word ‘earth’ in the OT and think flat while we can read the same word today and think spherical. He cannot, therefore, logically argue against the strong historical probability that the Hebrews believed the earth was flat because his own position agrees with that historical probability.

    “Holding says I provided, ‘…an impressive and informative list proving that several early scientifically naïve societies thought either that the earth was flat and/or was surrounded by water on all sides, upon which the land floated.’ This statement begins accurately, but then misrepresents both my original paper and a very important fact: It is not ‘several’ scientifically naïve societies (people who have no modern Western scientific knowledge) who thought the earth was flat, but virtually all of them, hundreds of them all across the world, in every part of the earth. It is such a universal belief that one scholar has called it ‘the usual primitive conception.’ In the light of this universality, it would be contrary to probability to think that the Hebrews, who were a scientifically naïve society, did not believe that the earth was flat.

    “In addition, the most influential and dominant cultures in the Near East in OT times, namely the Mesopotamian and the Egyptian, believed the earth was flat. Since the forefathers of the Hebrews were Mesopotamians and their greatest leader, Moses, was trained in ‘all the wisdom of the Egyptians,’ it is historically probable that they inherited the belief that the earth was flat. Putting the universality of the belief in a flat earth together with the specific historical background of the Hebrews, one must conclude that it is historically probable that the Hebrews believed the earth was flat. From a historical point of view it is highly improbable that the Hebrews did NOT think the earth was flat. Consequently, there is a heavy burden of proof on anyone saying the Hebrews did not believe the earth was flat.”

    Seelyʼs research, along with that of several other Evangelical scholars (like Gordon Wenhamʼs commentary on Genesis 1-15), helped convince Dr. John Walton, a professor of O.T. at Wheaton College, that the ancient Hebrew writers of the Bible imagined the shape of the cosmos was flat. See Dr. Waltonʼs NIV APPLICATION Commentary on Genesis (Zondervan, 2001). Keep in mind that Wheaton is an Evangelical Christian institution, Billy Grahamʼs alma mater in fact. Waltonʼs APPLICATION commentary is worth a read, because he agrees as I do with much mainstream scholarship in the area of the shape of the ancient biblical cosmos.


Further Resources

Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography by Wayne Horowitz (Eisenbrauns, 1998) “The strengths of this study are Horowitzʼs demonstrated familiarity with the available Sumerian and Assyrian texts relevant to the Mesopotamian perceptions of the physical structure of the universe and its constituent parts, and his meticulous and intelligent presentation of them in an attractive and accessible format. Indeed, it is a handsome book, of the high quality typical of Eisenbrauns. Advanced students and scholars whose interests lie in Mesopotamian cosmography and who wish to explore it further will find this work to be an indispensable resource.”—Marilyn M. Schaub, Duquesne University in The Catholic Biblical Quarterly (61, 1999)

Famed Presbyterian inerrantist, B. B. Warfield, whose defense of Scriptural inerrancy and inspiration was published in the Princeton Review (1881), and republished since then (B. B. Warfield and Hodge, A. A., Inspiration. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), continues to be highly regarded among conservative Protestants, yet he wrote that an inspired writer of the Bible could “share the ordinary opinions of his day in certain matters lying outside the scope of his teachings, as, for example, with reference to the form of the earth, or its relation to the sun; and, it is not inconceivable that the form of his language when incidentally adverting to such matters, might occasionally play into the hands of such a presumption.” [B. B. Warfield, “The Real Problem of Inspiration,” in The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia, Presbyterian & Reformed, 1948) 166-67.]

Charles Hodge accepted the solidity of the sky in Scripture as a divine accommodation. [Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952), 569-70.]

Famed Baptist theologian, Augustus Strong, wrote, “Inspiration might leave the Scripture writers in possession of the scientific ideas of their time, while yet they were empowered correctly to declare both ethical and religious truth.” [Augustus H. Strong, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Philadelpha: Judson Press, c. 1907), 226.]

Gordon Wenham, Genesis 1-15, Word Biblical Commentary (Waco: Word, 1987) takes the ancient Near Eastern context of Genesis seriously.

Dr. Conrad Hyers (retired Chair of Religion at Gustavus Adolphus College), The Meaning of Creation, and also an online article that deals with some of the topics raised in that book, “Genesis Knows Nothing of Scientific Creationism: Interpreting and Misinterpreting the Biblical Texts”

Dr. Stephen C. Meyers (Th.D. from Trinity Evangelical Seminary of Florida and co-founder of the Institute for Biblical and Scientific Studies) addresses how seriously the Bibleʼs ancient Near Eastern context must be taken when discussing its creation stories and cosmology. His thesis in grad school was titled, “A Biblical Cosmology.” See: “Genesis One” & “The Bible and Science, Do They Agree?”

Article by a Jewish scholar: “Biblical Views of Creation” by Frederick E. Greenspahn

Cheers, Ed

Flat Earth Assumptions of Biblical Authors

Wolf Worms, the Bot Fly, and The Lord of the Flies?

Hope youʼre not eating. Botfly Info

Video of a Botfly being removed from a girls head: www.vexman.com Botfly Story

Ed Babinski writes: The Designer sure knows how to invent creatures to bite and tear or debilitate other creatures.

I guess the Designer got bored with designing flies that just laid their eggs on excrement or on a dead carcass or on decaying vegetable matter (Iʼm not sure about the last one, but the designer could probably invent flies who did just that). Instead he had to design flies whose maggots lived and bred in an annoying fashion in the flesh of squirrels.

The Screw worm fly of Africa has to find a wound in the flesh of a cow or human being and lays its eggs there (since itʼs tiny mouth canʼt bite through the skin of the animals it lays its eggs upon). The eggs hatch and the maggots develop biting parts that allow them to burrow deeper and gorge themselves on their host, be it cow or man. They often bore into the lungs or even the brain, and the cow or human being dies. Oh that Designer!

I asked my daughter [as a Christian] if she believed God “created” that awful parasite on the squirrel (she saw the gross photos)... those worm parasites cause the nasty sac they lay up in, to “drain fluid”. I nearly threw up looking at the photos. Anyway, I asked her if she believes God “designed” or “created” those parasites, and she answered me, “No.” I asked her, “Then how did they get there? Where did they come from?” She thought and answered, “I donʼt know.” I asked her then, “Do you think they could have evolved?” She thought and replied, “Probably.”

Botfly aka Wolf Worm

That poor squirrel came back today and I just couldnʼt resist snapping more photos of this totally ugly, filthy, gross parasite.

Bot Fly Fan Page!!!

“I was both fascinated and disgusted by the stories about bot flies and related what I was reading to my girlfriend, Heather, who was also grossed out. We participate in an online music community called Songfight! and had decided to write a song for the upcoming fight (April 27 - May 4). After reading about bot flies, the title “A Very Unlikely Occurrence” seemed to hold the most promise and Heather decided to write lyrics about bot flies. And so, this song was born”:

Here are the lyrics in case you canʼt understand the words:

We are bot fly larvae!
We like our dinners fresh!
We are bot fly larvae!
Feeding on your flesh!

We burrow in your epidermis
To warble as we please
A very unlikely occurrence
Unless traveling in Belize

Mosquitoes give us transference
Weʼre carried on their knees
Distance is no deterrence
We find our prey with ease

Cuz we are bot fly larvae!
We like our dinners fresh!
We are bot fly larvae!
Feeding on your flesh!

Weʼll dig into your scrota
To grow our metanota
Someday weʼll pop right out
And then youʼll know what that oozing bump was all about!

We are bot fly larvae!
We like our dinners fresh!
We are bot fly larvae!
Feeding on your flesh!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it and maybe you can find some other bot fly enthusiasts with which to share it.
Cheers,
Damien Di Fede

From www.vexman.com/stories.htm

The Da Vinci Code, Fiction & The Gospels

The Da Vinci Code

Dan Brownʼs novel proves that FICTION can be highly engrossing, and obtain a wide readership—especially if the fiction begins with a fictional promise of unveiling truth (*smile*), and especially if the market is ripe for it. The same might also be said of the Gospels and why they became “bestsellers.”

British actor Ian McKellen who appeared in The Da Vinci Code, put it this way: “Iʼve often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying this is fiction. I mean, walking on water, it takes an act of faith.”

Quite a few people — including many fans of Dan Brownʼs book — will probably be displeased with such sentiments, but itʼs difficult to argue that significant amounts of the Bible arenʼt fiction. Obviously some portions are historical to one degree or another, but any more historical than the true parts of Dan Brownʼs novel? [Austin Cline at http://atheism.about.com]

The Gospels were like a first-century “Da Vinci Code” novel, featuring wild pesher and midrashic interpretations of “riddles and clues” that God allegedly added to the ancient Hebrew books of the Bible, written centuries before Jesus was born, yet which “foretold” his arrival and even incidents of his deeds, death and resurrection. The earliest Gospel, “Mark,” also speaks mysteriously about Jesus being secretive about his true identity. Sounds similar to the unconvincing arguments found in Dan Brownʼs mystery novel! Especially since the alleged “prophecies about Jesus” which were lifted (sometimes a mere half verse at a time) from the O.T. were based on the most tenuous of alleged connections, or even possibly based on making some stories of Jesus up just to suit the verses! [Google Jeff Lowderʼs online article, “The Fabulous Prophecies of the Messiah;” and also google “Fiddler Zvi” and his online “Messiah and Tanakh” page. Also note that the earliest Gospel, of which 90% was reproduced in the two later ones, Matthew and Luke, is also the gospel featuring the idea that Jesusʼs messiahship was originally kept a secret, which is a bit different from the last written Gospel were Jesusʼs messiahship is out in the open from the start beginning with Nathaniel in chapter one and with Jesus speaking solely about himself every chance he got in public, “I am” this, “I am that,” with not a word spent talking in parables to the public.

Another point raised by the Da Vinci Code is the haughtiness and self-seeking hierarchies of the Catholic church and her theologians, a point that even Christians throughout history have raised in ways that might make Dan Brown smile in recognition:

Take the words of the Catholic satirist, Erasmus, “As for the theologians, perhaps it would be better to pass them over in silence, not stirring up a hornetsʼ nest and not laying a finger on the stinkweed, since this race of men is incredibly arrogant and touchy. For they might rise up en masse and march in ranks against me with six hundred conclusions and force me to recant. And if I should refuse, they would immediately shout ‘heretic.’ For this is the thunderbolt they always keep ready at a moments notice to terrify anyone to whom they are not very favorably inclined” (Erasmus 57).

His commentary continues regarding the theologiansʼ ridiculous penchant for “endless and magisterial definitions, conclusions,” and “corollaries” (Erasmus 58).

“They [theologians] are so blessed by their self love as to be fully persuaded that they themselves dwell in the third heaven, looking down from high above on all other mortals as if they were earth-creeping vermin almost worthy of their pity…”

“Moreover, they explicate sacred mysteries just as arbitrarily as they please, explaining by what method the world was established and arranged, by what channels original sin is transmitted to Adamʼs posterity, by what means, by what proportion, in how short a period of time Christ was fully formed in the virginʼs womb… There are others which they think worthy of great and ‘illuminated’ [in the faith by the Holy Spirit] theologians, as they say. If they ever encounter these, they really perk up. Whether there is any instant in the generation of the divine persons? Whether there is more than one filial relationship in Christ? Whether the following proposition is possible: God the Father hates the Son. Whether God could have taken on the nature of a woman, of the devil, of an ass, of a cucumber, of a piece of flint? And then how the cucumber would have preached, performed miracles, and been nailed to the cross?…”

Dan Brown, in comparison with Erasmus, simply wondered whether Jesus could have had children and still “saved the world.”

Erasmus continued, “And then these most subtle subtleties are rendered even more subtle by the various ‘ways’ or types of scholastic theology, so that you could work your way out of a labyrinth sooner than out of the intricacies of the Realists, Nominalists, Thomists, Albertists, Occamists, Scotists—and I still havenʼt mentioned all the sects, but only the main ones.”

Erasmus does not spare the “religious” or the “monks” his berating wit either. Erasmus branded those who considered themselves “religious” or “monk” to be anything but that which such monikers signify. He, in fact, couldnʼt imagine “how anything could be more wretched than these men,” who were in reality “far removed from religion” and “encountered more frequently everywhere you go” (Erasmus 61).

Popes and priests are offered the same treatment. Popes are painted as the antithesis of the Christ example of poverty, labor, teaching, and sacrifice. It is the popes who have an abundance of luxuries, honor, and pomp. Popes have all of the advantages this life can afford. “How many advantages would these men be deprived of if they were ever assailed by wisdom” (Erasmus 66)? The priests, on the other hand, and when not fighting “for their right to [being given the] tithes [of parishioners], with sword, spears, and stone, with every imaginable sort of armed force,” are busy keeping a “sharp lookout to harvest their profits” (Erasmus 67-68).

SOURCE: Erasmus, Desiderius. In Praise of Folly. A Reformation Reader: Primary Texts with Introductions. Ed. Denis Janz. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999.

So if Dan Brown satirized excesses within the Catholic Church, perhaps he was too light in doing so, especially when compared with what Erasmus (a reform-minded Catholic humanist) and Martin Luther (a former Catholic who became a Protestant Reformer) both wrote about it!

The Da Vinci Code, Fiction and The Gospels

Lumpy Squirrels - Wolfworm or Bot Fly

I was photographing a squirrel yesterday. No particular reason, except that it was busy munching on a mushroom... got my camera. I wondered how squirrels are so much smarter than humans, to pick the edible mushrooms from the poison ones. I see them a lot in my front yard. However, yesterday as this particular squirrel turned around, I caught something on it, I never expected to.

Would like to know the cause, and if its infectious.

Deformed Squirrel? Mange? Disease?
Hi, I hope somebody can answer this question. Iʼve got a question about a squirrel I caught on camera yesterday. The closest thing I came to on Google was “notoedric mange”, and learned it can kill animals if they lose enough hair, but after looking at the photos, it doesnʼt seem to be what was ailing this particular squirrel.

This squirrel was bare across its shoulders of hair, and had what appeared to be some kind of growth(s) hanging from itʼs shoulder.

Iʼve never seen anything like this on any squirrels.
Iʼve uploaded images.
Can anyone shed some light on this?

Wolfworm or botfly

“Jerry Sparks” wrote:

I would suspect that this is a larval infection from a nasty fly. In these parts (i.e., eastern Kentucky) we refer to these larval forms as a “Wolfworm”. I have seen this many times in skunks, rabbits, cats, and other small mammals in the area. Check out this web site for further info.

http://botfly.ifas.ufl.edu/abotfly/overview.htm

I hope this helps.

Kudos to you

The Irreverent Musings of Harry McCall (And Others)

The Irreverent Musings of Harry McCall (former Christian seminarian, still a lover of Biblical studies, having been bitten by the “Bible bug”)

The Bible is like a senile senior citizen, semi-coherent and out of touch with reality—but his loving children (believers), via their denials and creative ingenuity, lovingly take him by the arm and theologically help him to shuffle along.


Iʼm sitting here at my keyboard thinking about my past life as an Evangelical Christian. How did I ever believe all the doctrines, and swallow the love mixed with strange fears, for decade after decade? I appear to have been victimized by a frighteningly overpowering (dare I saw psychotic) mix of something the Bible (and my church) called Godʼs “love,” mingled with that same Godʼs “eternal hatred,” and, I was also taught that I was the one to blame for this weird mix, I was the one “asking for it!”

As a Christian I heard John 3:16 run into the ground about how God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten son to die for us. Even Jesus said we should call God “Father”—a loving father who forgives us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, gives us our daily bread, sends blessed rain on the farmerʼs fields of both the just and unjust, or who would leave 99 of his sheep to hunt for the single lost one. Of course this love only lasts till judgment day (or till we die, whichever comes first). Because on that day our loving Father morphs from a kindly Dr. Jekyll into a sadistic Mr. Hyde (or maybe more like “Sybil”—as in the academy award winning movie of the same name—whose mother loved her one moment only to beat and torture her the next).

Thus, the perennial question that young believers and non-Christians ask: If God is a God of love, why does He morph into someone who demands eternal punishment, as if to say, “Remember all that stuff I said before? ‘Peace on earth goodwill toward men?’ ‘Blessed are the peacemakers?’ ‘Bless those who curse you?’ ‘Love your enemies?’ ‘Love keeps no record of wrongs… It always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails… These three remain: faith, hope and love?’ Forget about it. Youʼre dead now, and your rear end is mine!”

Of course a common modern reply is that “God does not send anyone to Hell. We send ourselves.” Yea, right! Just like Sybil MADE her psychotic mother punish, beat and torture her.

A god who slaughters families, not to mention cities, nations, and drowns the whole world, is acting in ways itʼs difficult for any human being with an ounce of compassion to not view as reacting questionably. This is a god who also blames the victims eternally, as a way to justify the horrific gore He puts them though.

One might picture it this way: After death the Christian comes into the presence of a God who quickly begins morphing into a sadistic vampire-like character. The Christian of course canʼt hold up a cross, or use “holy water” to ward off God, instead, Christians must use the blood of Jesus to compel God to draw back from his angry wish to inflict eternal punishment (anger that God blames on the victim and that preachers insist we are asking for). God smells the aroma of Jesusʼs blood and his irrational everlasting anger abates, so the Christian can get to live with this psychotic-like God forever. Itʼs like the movie, “The Exorcist,” with the Christian driving back Godʼs unquenchably angry desire for eternal vengeance by shouting: “The blood of Christ compels Thee!” God curses and screams, drawing back.


Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans “Jesus is at the right hand of God interceding for us“ in heaven. (Romans 8:34, NIV) While Romans 14:12 tells us that each person is going to have to step up and “give account of himself to God” even though God already knows all the thoughts of our hearts (Romans 8:28). (Not that “heart” is necessarily being used as a scientific term by Paul, though it also canʼt be denied that in Paulʼs day many did believe that “hearts” had “thoughts.”)

But returning to the image or metaphor of “Jesus at the right hand of God interceding for us” in heaven. Not to be coy, but how exactly am I to imagine the need for incessant “intercession?” Didnʼt Jesus suffer, “become sin,” say “it is finished,” then die and rise from the dead, and ascend into heaven? But after he got to heaven he was assigned yet another job, which is to “intercede for us” to the Father—who apparently is still highly prone to yet more anger? Or forgetfulness?

Scene: Heaven

God: “That Christian down there is really starting to p*ss me off! I should let him slip into sin further, send him strong delusion that he might believe a lie, send in some lying spirits, and let Satan have his way with him—but save some for me to punish eternally.”

Jesus: “Forgive him father. I died for him.”

God: “Oh, yeah, I remember. O.K. But what about that other Christian right there who is…”

Jesus: “Forgive her father. I died for her.”

God: “Oh, yeah, I remember. O.K.”

And Jesus after 2,000 years and for the sixtrillionth time: “Forgive him father. I died for Him.”

And God for the sixtrillionth time: “Oh, yeah, I remember. O.K.”

Little wonder neither God nor Jesus has time to answer prayers since both now find themselves in a Catch-22 situation; one of eternal intercession:

“Blaugh, blaugh, blaugh: O.K.”
“Blaugh, blaugh, blaugh: O.K.”
F-O-R-E-V-E-R!

Maybe this is why churches must repeat prayers over and over again in liturgical rotation from Sunday to Sunday. In a similar fashion advanced Alzheimerʼs patients must also hold to a repetitious stabilized environment.

Or maybe Jesus at some point will get tired of begging God to have mercy, and turn toward the earth, and shout, QUIT sinning you guys! Iʼve interceded enough! Give me a break! I need some “down time!”

Of course the idea of Jesus continually interceding for us also reminded me of something that St. Ansalem (sp?) wrote, that Jesusʼs love was so great he was going to “remain on the cross” until the last sinner was finally sprung “out of hell.” THAT kind of interceding makes sense if God truly “is love.” Because God and time are the best teachers.


I sometimes reflect on the way God/the Bible/a church/a theology blames its problems, difficulties and evils on humans. At the same time, we humans are never given any credit should we do something good. In short, if there is a problem, itʼs the fault of humans, but if a human being does something good, God alone gets the praise. People trained to view themselves in such an untterly “unworthy” manner will tend to assert the perfection of their particular religionʼs doctrines, and assert how utterly wrong everyone else is if they dare question the Bible or even their churchʼs interpretation of the Bible. In effect, they learn never to trust themselves, and get sucked into trusting their church, and their churchʼs particular doctrines and interpretations of its holy book, everyone else be damned.

Compare that with, say, a theology that teaches there is a spark of goodness already inside everyone, and peopleʼs “job” is to blow on that spark and brighten it further?


We come to God/the Bible/a church/a theology wanting our inmost pains healed, be they loneliness, fears, or uncertainties; and to gain protection and gain certitude; only to be handed in exchange a much larger and complex set of problems we could ever have bargained for, called “theology.” (Thatʼs whatʼs called the old “bait-and-switch.”) Itʼs like the case of a trusting child who depends on the adult to protect them and comfort them, only to be abused because the adult has much more serious, older and deeper issues than the child in his care. “God” and “theology” are complex reflections of the history of human mental agony—an agony steeped in a questionable form of “love.”


The New Testament states that Jesus “became sin” [or was “treated as sin”] while on the cross. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21) Did Jesus become as hated as “sin” and/or “Satan” in Godʼs eyes? Did God hate Himself? Did an infinite God wind up hating himself and released His full wrath on Himself, treating Himself as “sin,” all because some of his finite creatures ate some forbidden fruit? Sounds a bit difficult to swallow.

Harry McCall (whose testimony appears in Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists)


Some Musings Of Others

I read in the Gospels that Jesus forgave the men who nailed him to the cross.

He even promised, “This day you shall be with me in paradise,” to a thief crucified next to him—a thief who addressed Jesus simply as a “man” rather than as “the son of God.”

Yet, today, this same Jesus cannot forgive my kindly old aunt and allow her to dwell in paradise, simply because her “beliefs” do not match Reverend So-and-Soʼs?

Arthur Silver


They say that when god was in Jerusalem he forgave his murderers, but now he will not forgive an honest man for differing with him on the subject of the Trinity.

They say that God says to me, “Forgive your enemies.” I say, “I do;” but he says, “I will damn mine.” God should be consistent. If he wants me to forgive my enemies he should forgive his. I am asked to forgive enemies who can hurt me. God is only asked to forgive enemies who cannot hurt him. He certainly ought to be as generous as he asks us to be.

Robert Ingersoll


When all has been considered, it seems to me to be the irresistible intuition that infinite punishment for finite sin would be unjust, and therefore wrong. We feel that even weak and erring Man would shrink from such an act. And we cannot conceive of God as acting on a lower standard of right and wrong.

Lewis Carroll (author of Alice in Wonderland), “Eternal Punishment,” Diversions and Digressions of Lewis Carroll


It is strange to me that people can consign others to hell without a scruple. One only has to remember a toothache, not to wish it eternally on anyone.

Lucy Daugalis (daugalis@arcom.com.au)


Given headaches, backaches, toothaches, strains, scrapes, breaks, cuts, rashes, burns, bruises, PMS, fatigue, hunger, odors, molds, colds, yeast, parasites, viruses, cancers, genetic defects, blindness, deafness, paralysis, mental illness, ugliness, ignorance, miscommunications, embarrassments, unrequited love, dashed hopes, boredom, hard labor, repetitious labor, accidents, old age, senility, fires, floods, earthquakes, typhoons, tornadoes, hurricanes and volcanoes, I can not see how anyone, after they are dead, deserves “eternal punishment” as well.

E.T.B.


When I was a boy I heard tell of an old farmer in Vermont. He was dying. The minister was at his bedside—asked him if he was a Christian, if he was prepared to die. The old man answered that he had made no preparation, that he was not a Christian, that he had never done anything but work. The preacher said that he could give him no hope unless he had faith in Christ, and that if he had no faith his soul would certainly be lost.

The old man was not frightened. He was perfectly calm. In a weak and broken voice he said, “Mr. Preacher, I suppose you noticed my farm. My wife and I came here more than fifty years ago. We were just married. It was a forest then and the land was covered with stones. I cut down the trees, burned the logs, picked up the stones, and laid the walls. My wife spun and wove and worked every moment. We raised and educated our children—denied ourselves. During all these years my wife never had a good dress, or a decent bonnet. I never had a good suit of clothes. We lived on the plainest food. Our hands, our bodies are deformed by toil. We never had a vacation. We loved each other and the children. That is the only luxury we ever had. Now I am about to die and you ask me if I am prepared. Mr. Preacher, I have no fear of the future, no terror of any other world. There may be such a place as hell—but if there is, you never can make me believe that itʼs any worse than old Vermont.”

Robert Ingersoll, “Why I Am An Agnostic”


Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, “casting” billions of people into a “lake of fire whose smoke rises up forever,” because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.

Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist [Edited by E.T.B.]


Jesus loves you unconditionally, and if you do not believe it you will when you are in hell.

Source unknown


According to Christianity eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions Godʼs infinite love. Thatʼs the message weʼre brought up with, believe or die. “Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options.”

Bill Hicks (comedian), Rant in E-minor, CD


As a tot I was given the usual terrifying mixed message: a) God is love; and b) If you donʼt believe how much he loves you, you will stand in the corner for eternity.

James Lileks, “God Has Call Waiting,” Notes of a Nervous Man


Any religion that teaches there is only heaven or hell is gonna be a haven for manic-depressives.

E.T.B.


Do I believe in eternal punishment? Hell no. I always believed God could get his revenge in far less time.

Robert Ingersoll


God recently remodeled hell. He replaced the flames of eternal damnation with a microwave. Now, instead of taking forever, His revenge is complete in seconds. The only hard part is hanging on while the plate rotates.

E.T.B.


An idea, which has terrified millions, claims that some of us will go to a place called Hell, where we will suffer eternal torture. This does not scare me because, when I try to imagine a Mind behind this universe, I cannot conceive that Mind, usually called “God,” as totally mad. I mean, guys, compare that “God” with the worst monsters you can think of—Adolph Hitler, Joe Stalin, that sort of guy. None of them ever inflicted more than finite pain on their victims. Even de Sade, in his sado-masochistic fantasy novels, never devised an unlimited torture. The idea that the Mind of Creation (if such exists) wants to torture some of its critters for endless infinities of infinities seems too absurd to take seriously. Such a deranged Mind could not create a mud hut, much less the exquisitely mathematical universe around us.

If such a monster-God did exist, the sane attitude would consist of practicing the Buddhist virtue of compassion. Donʼt give way to hatred: try to understand and forgive him. Maybe He will recover his wits some day.

Robert Anton Wilson, “Cheerful Reflections on Death and Dying,” Gnoware, February 1999


Conservative Christian theologians teach that if you make the wrong choice and believe the wrong thing, you will be tortured for eternity in hell. Thatʼs not a “choice,” itʼs more like a man telling his girlfriend, do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out. When a man says this we call him a psychopath.

William C. Easttom II [Edited by E.T.B]


Some Christians argue that eternal hell should be viewed as “Godʼs great compliment.” But if hell is a “compliment,” what does God do when he wants to “insult” someone?

Others argue that hell is a “loving provision,” a place where non-Christian souls are safe from the pain they would feel if they were exposed to Godʼs presence. Such apologists for “a kinder, gentler hell” seem to have forgotten their own Bible where it says Jesus visited hell and preached to the souls there. So apparently God can “tone down” His presence at will, becoming “Jesus” who mingled with “sinners and wine-bibbers” in Judea and Galilee, as well as preached to “souls in hell.” If Catholics and Lutherans are right, God can even put His “presence” in communion wafers. And most people can eat even a consecrated communion wafer without it burning their tongues (unless the person happens to have a strong allergic reaction to wheat).

By the way, those Christians who are willing to question the notion of a firey retributive hell lit by Godʼs jealousy and anger, should also take their questioning to the next level and ask why “hell” needs to be any worse than this world? We have pain and sickness here, we suffer here, but there is also room for healing, growth and education, and speaking of education, what better teachers could there be than God and time?

E.T.B.


Primates often have trouble imagining a universe not run by an angry alpha male.


Any infinite Being who feels it is their duty to torture me for eternity, should switch to decaf.

E.T.B.

Gimme That Old False Prediction, It's Good Enough For Me

False Prophecy

The author of the letter to the Hebrews began his letter, “…in these last days,” and argued on such a basis that, “He (Jesus) would have needed to suffer often since the foundation of the world; but now once at the consummation He has been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.” With equal fervor he employed the phrase, “as you see the day drawing near…”—and made the prediction, “…for yet a very little while, He who is coming will come, and will not delay.” (Heb. 1:2; 9:26; 10:25,37) Oops! Thereʼs been a sleight delay.

Even worse is the fact that “at the consummation” can also be translated, “at the end of the age.” What does that phrase mean, “the end of the age?” A verse in the Gospel of Matthew defines it precisely: “At the end of the age… the Son of Man will send forth his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all stumbling blocks, and those who commit lawlessness, and will cast them into the furnace of fire; in that place there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” (Mat.13:40-41—the author based his description of “the end of the age” on Daniel 12, which was a description of the final judgment of mankind). So that is exactly what the author of Matthew and the author of Hebrews predicted would happen in their day, i.e., the final judgment of mankind.

Also note the logic behind the argument in Hebrews 9:26. The author argued that continuous sinning “since the foundation of the world” required blood sacrifices “often.” But God saw to it that Jesusʼs sacrifice occurred at a time when no further sacrifices would be required. That time could only be “at the consummation” or “at the end of the age” when the time of final judgment for all sinners had arrived. Thus he hoped to persuade his readers of Godʼs wonderful plan in having Jesus sacrifice himself “in these last days,” and that it was only a “very little while” before “he who is coming will come, and will not delay.” It should appear even to the most dense that the prediction as stated in the Book of Hebrews has failed. So, the author of Hebrews was a false prophet.

For more examples from the New Testament of false prophecies see, “The Lowdown on Godʼs Showdown”.

Debunking Christianity - Women Speak Out!

Deconversion of Women

Because blogs like “Debunking Christianity” are thick with male participants, some might wonder what women have written about the topic, especially women who once were conservative Christians. Below is an assortment of books, memoirs and autobiographies by women who have debunked Christianity, particularly conservative Christianity (both Protestant and Catholic). (I would also like to express my gratitude toward one female debunker in particular, Sharon Mooney—former member of the fundamentalistic inerrantist “Worldwide Church of God” sect, who left it for deism, and produced this website that features a variety of freethought articles.)

Below is a table of contents listing 21 former conservative Christian women along with their works that debunk conservative Christianity and/or their conservative Christian experience. After the initial list a longer section follows that features weblinks and additional data on each individual, as well as some Miscellaneous information related to women and Christianity.

Table Of Contents

  1. Barbara Brown Taylor—Author of Leaving Church: A Memoir Of Faith (2006). Female minister, widely revered Christian speaker, and beloved author of bestselling books on Christian spirituality, “leaves church.”

  2. Valerie Tarico—Psychologist and author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love And Truth (2006). “I am an ex-fundamentalist Christian, a graduate of Wheaton College (the alma mater of Billy Graham and a bastion of Evangelical education). My favorite Christian writer was C. S. Lewis.”

  3. Carlene Cross—Author of Fleeing Fundamentalism: A Ministerʼs Wife Examines Faith (2006). Publisherʼs Weekly writes: “After indoctrination at a Bible college, Cross finds herself in a marriage from hell. Her husband, a popular young pastor [and rising star of the Religious Right], uses religion to mask the alternate reality he has created, a netherworld that will potentially destroy not only his career but the entire familyʼs safety and sanity… Her heartfelt condemnation of public hypocrisy couldnʼt be more timely. In her ex-husbandʼs own self-indicting words: ‘Isnʼt it ironic, a guy condemning sinful society and completely without a conscience himself?’” (Ms. Cross is also a former student of Christian apologist, Gary Habermas, who now teaches at Liberty University.)

  4. Julia Scheeres—Author of Jesus Land: A Memoir (2005), published in both the U.S. and Britain. In the name of religion, Scheeres and her adopted black brother, David, suffered cruel abuse, first in their Calvinist home in Indiana in the 1970s, and then, when their surgeon father and missionary-minded mother sent the teens to a fundamentalist Dominican Republic reform school that is run like boot camp.

  5. Christine Rosen—Author of My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir Of A Divine Girlhood (2005). In many respects the Protestant fundamentalist Keswick Christian School in the 1980s was like Catholic schools of the 1950s: misbehaving students were paddled, girls forced to kneel on the floor to check skirt lengths, boys and girls required to keep a respectful six-inch distance from one another. But to Keswick students, Catholics and even some Protestants werenʼt true Christians, and it was incumbent upon the children to learn “strict morals and Bible belief” and then to “witness” to playmates and families… While young Christine was absorbing an ascetic worldview, her erratic mother was discovering—and unsuccessfully trying to interest her daughter in—Pentecostal fervor. Although today Rosen lives “an entirely secular life,” her tone is affectionate, and her subtle humor and ironically accurate descriptions will appeal to others with stringent religious backgrounds.

  6. Lanakila—Wife of a minister and “former moderator at Christian Forums where I debated atheists in the General Apologetics section. But I deconverted [from Christianity in 2003] while still taking an external degree program hosted by Liberty University (Jerry Falwellʼs fundamentalist institution). I stopped believing while taking a class called ‘Fundamental Theological Issues’ taught by Christian apologist and author, Dr. Gary Habermas.”

  7. Marlene Winell—Author of Leaving The Fold: A Guide For Former Fundamentalists And Others Leaving Their Religion (1994).

  8. Ellen Kamentsky—Author of Hawking God: A Young Jewish Womanʼs Ordeal In Jews For Jesus (1993). Former poster child for “Jews for Jesus” (whose face adorned one of their glossy ads in a major news magazine), explains why she left.

  9. Jo Ann Schneider Farris—Author of Sentenced For Life—A Story Of An Entry And An Exit Into The World Of Fundamentalist Christianity And Jews For Jesus (2002).

  10. Ruth Irene Garrett—Author (with Rick Farrant) of Crossing Over: One Womanʼs Escape From Amish Life (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003); and also, Born Amish (2004).

  11. Pauline A. Blankenship—Author of The Hellfire Preachers (ISBN: 187772906X Aardvark Publishers, 1990), a novel based on the real-life experiences of a woman who grew up in a fundamentalist church in east Texas.

  12. Marlene Oaks—Author of Old Time Religion Is A Cult (1985), whose testimony also appeared in Leaving The Fold: Testimonies Of Former Fundamentalists (1995).

  13. Sue Monk Kidd—Author of The Dance Of The Dissident Daughter: A Womanʼs Journey From Christian Tradition To The Sacred Feminine (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996). Former bestselling author of Christian spirituality leaves the fold of Christianity for a wider spiritual perspective. Her post-Christian novels are now being made into movies.

  14. Dr. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott—Author of Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach (2001); former professor at Bob Jones University.

  15. Dr. Daphne Hampson—Author of After Christianity (2nd Rev edition, 2003); and, Christian Contradictions: The Structures Of Lutheran And Catholic Thought (Cambridge University Press; New Ed edition (2004); former Anglican theologian.

  16. Dr. Uta Ranke-Heinemann (Uta Johanna Ingrid Heinemann)—Author of Eunuchs For The Kingdom Of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, And The Catholic Church; And, Putting Away Childish Things. She was the first ever female Catholic theologian for the world, but was stripped of her departmental chair and license to preach because she questioned doctrinal beliefs.

  17. Karen Armstrong—Author of The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out Of Darkness; former nun; and author of the bestseller, A History Of God.

  18. Joanne H. Meehl—Author of The Recovering Catholic: Personal Journeys Of Women Who Left The Church (Prometheus Books, 1995)

  19. Julia Sweeney—Producer and star of “Letting Go of God.” Nationwide speaker for freethought; former Catholic; former cast-member of Saturday Night Live.

  20. Dr. Mary Daly—Author of Amazon Grace: Re-Calling The Courage To Sin Big (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Former Catholic theologian.

  21. Barbara Allen—Author of Still Christian After All These Years, about her long and painful progress from being raised in a rigid fundamentalist home to her adult embrace of a generous, loving Anglican Christianity, including her Bob Jones experience, accompanying her pastor husband to a dizzying number of small churches, etc.


Additional Links And Information On The Above Women And Their Work

  1. Barbara Brown Taylor—Author of Leaving Church: A Memoir Of Faith.
    Her Homepage
    Ten years ago Baylor University published a list of the worldʼs “most effective” English-speaking preachers and only one of the top twelve was a woman: Barbara Brown Taylor. After having had volumes of her sermons published and spoken round the country and overseas, she surprised her growing number of admirers by resigning from her church and accepting a teaching “chair of religion” at a local liberal arts college. Taylor isnʼt the first to leave parish work in search of a second career as a professor. Religion departments are full of clerics and/or former clerics, but few compose memoirs as honestly and masterfully as she, that walk the reader through the conscious and subconscious hopes and fears of all the years of “church life.” Not that Taylor betrays parishionerʼs confidences; her writing, rather, covers interior ground.—Evelyn Bence]

    Taylorʼs new revealing book is titled, Leaving Church: A Memoir Of Faith (Harper, May 2006).

    Hereʼs an excerpt:

    “By now I expected to be a seasoned parish minister, wearing black clergy shirts grown gray from frequent washing. I expected to love the children who hung on my legs after Sunday morning services until they grew up and had children of their own. I even expected to be buried wearing the same red vestments in which I was ordained.”

    “Today those vestments are hanging in the sacristy of an Anglican church in Kenya, my church pension is frozen, and I am as likely to spend Sunday mornings with friendly Quakers, Presbyterians, or Congregationalists as I am with the Episcopalians who remain my closest kin. Sometimes I even keep the Sabbath with a cup of steaming Assam tea on my front porch, watching towhees vie for the highest perch in the poplar tree while God watches me. These days I earn my living teaching school, not leading worship, and while I still dream of opening a small restaurant in Clarkesville or volunteering at an eye clinic in Nepal, there is no guarantee that I will not run off with the circus before I am through. This is not the life I planned, or the life I recommend to others. But it is the life that has turned out to be mine, and the central revelation in it for me—that the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human—seems important enough to witness to on paper. This book is my attempt to do that.”

    Taylorʼs website also features an address she gave at the Washington National Cathedral in June, 2006, a few paragraphs of which appear below:

    “If my other books have been whole milk books, this is my single malt scotch book, which is the main thing I want to speak with you about tonight. After twenty years of telling the public truth—the truth I believed was both true for all and good for all, or at least all within the sound of my voice—my first attempt at telling the private truth—the truth that may only be true or good for me—well, that was quite a stretch. Clergy spend a lot of time talking about what is right, in case you hadnʼt noticed. For once, I thought I would concentrate on what was true—just for me, from my limited point of view on planet Earth—in hopes that might be helpful to someone else trying to do the same thing.”

    “Making the move from sermon to memoir has been one of the more strenuous passages in my life, and it also makes the reviews a whole lot scarier to read. A couple of weeks ago I received one via e-mail with “Review of You” in the subject line. Just for the record, my mother confirms that everything in the book is true… ”

    “A preacher who wants to keep his or her job would do well to avoid trying to say anything true about sex, money, politics, war, or existential despair in church. It is also not a good idea to question established readings of scripture or tradition…”

    “While I knew plenty of clergy willing to complain about the high expectations and long hours, few of us spoke openly about the toxic effects of being identified as the holiest person in a congregation. Whether this honor was conferred by those who recognized our gifts for ministry or was simply extended by them as a professional courtesy, it was equally hard on the honorees. Those of us who believed our own press developed larger-than-life swaggers and embarrassing patterns of speech, while those who did not suffered lower back pain and frequent bouts of sleeplessness. Either way, we were deformed.”

    “We were not God, but we spent so much tending the God-place in peopleʼs lives that it was easy to understand why someone might get us confused…”

    “In 1997, after fifteen years of full time parish ministry, I left my little church in the north Georgia foothills of the Appalachians to become a college teacher. My soul was sunburned, for one thing. I thought there was a chance I had lost my vocation, for another, although I continued to preach and to teach preaching in between my undergraduate classes on everything from the religions of the world to the life and letters of Paul.”

    “The teaching was and is wonderful. I get to work with nineteen and twenty year olds—an age group I saw very little of in church. I get to ask the questions instead of providing the answers, which is a great freedom and relief. I also get to give grades, which clergy only do in their secret fantasies. (I am sorry, Mr. Smith, but your efforts have been so minimal that I am afraid you have flunked Lent.) I am still a Master of Divinity—isnʼt that an interesting name for a theological degree?—but more importantly to me now, I am a member of the Department of Humanities, whose truth-telling has taken a decidedly private turn.”

    “My last book came out six years ago—a long time, for a wordy person. When people asked me what the hold up was, I told them I had lost my long time editor at Cowley Publications, which was true, but I had also lost my voice—or my voice was changing, anyway, and I did not yet trust it enough to put anything in print. I was no longer a parish priest. Many of my old certainties about life and faith had slipped from my hands.”

    And here are a few more quotations from Taylorʼs book, Leaving Church:

    “I learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty.”

    “I empty the bag of my old convictions on the kitchen table to decide what I will keep.” [Ultimately what Taylor keeps will not satisfy orthodox Christians, as it has more to do with faith (as a verb) than with beliefs.”—Evelyn Bence

  2. Valerie Tarico—Psychologist and author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love And Truth.

    Her book is available here

    For musings of the author on life, society, and Christianity visit her blog here.

    The Preface and Chapter One of her book appear at her blog.

    Chapters of her book will also be published one weekly on ex-Christian.net through 2006.

    “I am an ex-fundamentalist Christian, a graduate of Wheaton College (the alma mater of Billy Graham and a bastion of Evangelical education). My favorite Christian writer was C. S. Lewis. Resting in the confidence that all truth is Godʼs truth, I kept asking questions:

    • “If God is good, and he made nature, why does nature so often reward strength rather than goodness?”
    • “Why do so many people, including children, suffer excruciating pain, even pain unto death?”
    • “Does it really make sense to say that Adam and Eve brought death into the world?”
    • “Why do so many scientists think the world wasnʼt made six to ten thousand years ago like my biblical genealogies suggest?”
    • “Why does the violence in the Bible still bother me, after Iʼve had it explained so many times?”
    • “How does blood atonement (salvation through the death of Jesus) work?”
    • “All of those Buddhists and Hindus on the other side of the world who are going to suffer eternally: if God decided they would be born there, how is their damnation fair?”
    • “How can heaven be perfectly joyous if it co-exists with hell?”
    • “If each Christian has the spirit of God dwelling in him or her, how come Christians are wrong so often?”
    • “Are Christians really better than other people?”
    • “Would the world truly fall into violent anarchy if the Christians werenʼt here as ‘a light shining in the darkness?’”
    • “How did we come to believe all that we do, anyway? Where did the Bible come from?”
    • “Who decided what got included, and why?”
    • “Why do I feel like Iʼm lying to myself when I try to make all the pieces fit together?”

    “I spent years contorting myself as an advocate for my beliefs, finding complex arguments to explain away the fossil record, the suffering of innocents, the capricious favoritism of my God, the logical inconsistencies of scripture, and the aberrant behavior of my fellow believers. And, rather like your average conspiracy theorist, when I went into my mental exercises with an a priori conclusion, I could make the pieces fit.”

    “Finally exhausted from the strain, I untangled myself, and looked at the pieces all together. There werenʼt many conclusions that made much sense. I no longer had clean answers about what was true, but my old ones clearly contradicted both morality and reason. The only hope I had of pursuing goodness and truth was to let those answers go.”

    “At times, when you look at an entire body of evidence, when you look at it all together, some possibilities are pretty easy to rule out. You may not know exactly what is real, but you can be confident that some things are not. So it is with Evangelical teachings. When one examines the evidence related to Evangelical beliefs—the content and history of the Bible, the structure of natureʼs design, the character of the Evangelical God, the implications of prayer and miracles, the concepts original and universal sin, the mechanism of salvation by blood atonement, the idea of eternal reward and punishment, the behavior of believers—when one examines all of these together through a lens of empiricism and logic, the composite suggests some kind of reality that is very different from the ideas that dominated my thinking for so long.”

    “Many books depict the Evangelical experience as a spiritual journey, a journey from darkness to the light of salvation. But few describe a path that leads people out of traditional faith to another place and another source of light. When ex-believers write, they usually write about the things that do make sense to them, not about the contradictions they have left behind. Rare exceptions include: Losing Faith In Faith by Daniel Barker and Annie L. Gaylor, Farewell To God by Charles Templeton, and The Event Horizon Rider by Brian Elroy McKinley. Edward Babinskiʼs book, Leaving The Fold, contains testimonials by ex-fundamentalists who have found their way to other forms of thinking.”

    “Equally rare are Christian scholars like Don Cupitt and John Shelby Spong, who, from within the faith, unflinchingly examine every dogma as a possible source of idolatry, expose each to the light of reason and compassion, and then ask what core of transcendence remains. To these voices in the wilderness, I add my own, not as an ex-minister or scholar, but as an ordinary ex-Evangelical who thought too much about questions that would not simply vanish if I applied more faith.”

  3. Carlene Cross—Author of Fleeing Fundamentalism: A Ministerʼs Wife Examines Faith, Algonquin (304 pp.) 2006

    Her Homepages are here and here.

    “A memoir of my years as a Fundamentalist ministerʼs wife, my loss of faith and my escape from religion. I went to a Bible College and married one of the Religious Rightʼs rising stars. However, after years in the movement I began to question the legitimacy of organized religion. And I watched my husband spiral secretly deeper into depression, alcoholism and sexual addiction. I finally broke free and left him and the church. After my divorce in 1990, I went back to school and completed a BA and an MA in History at the University of Washington, eventually becoming a Public Television Producer and writer.”

    Ms. Cross also sent me the following email:

    “Dear Ed [Edward T. Babinski], I was reading your website today and enjoyed reading your letter to Dr. Gary Habermas (who now teaches at Liberty University). He was an old professor of mine in the 1970ʼs at Big Sky Bible College. Even though Habermas remains a conservative Biblical inerrantist, he was a ‘liberal’ compared to the views espoused by the other professors at Big Sky!… You have written a superb critique of the resurrection. Bravo!”

    KIRKUS REVIEW, August 1, 2006

    Midwest farmerʼs daughter marries fundamentalist minister and confronts disillusionment in this brave memoir. As a girl in the late 1960s on her familyʼs Montana farm, Cross (The Undying West) wanted desperately to live a more glamorous, urban life, “where people didnʼt have to wage war against the elements of nature and spoke with proper English.” A preacherʼs visit to the farm lured her and her mother into a Protestant sect that taught that the Bible represented the exact words of God and Jesus was going to return to “rapture” faithful Christians to heaven. Instead of dreaming of travel to faraway places, young Carlene immersed herself in the Book of Revelation, and attended Big Sky Bible College; while there, she briefly served as a Bible teacher to an extremely isolated Hutterite colony and volunteered to hand out Bibles behind the Iron Curtain. Soon, she fell for college dreamboat David Brant, but she preserved her virginity until marriage. (In their case, sex turned out to not be worth waiting for.) Eventually, David was ordained and settled on a ministry at the Calvary Baptist Church in Seattle. He was a flamboyant and popular preacher, but his congregation had no idea that this father of three had a troubling obsession with pornography. He was also frequently away from home, which gave Carlene time to commiserate about her unsatisfying marriage with another unhappy wife. Susan proved to be a lifelong friend, supporting the author through the shame of scandal and divorce. Gradually, Cross got her life on track, found a job and went back to school. Now, she writes, she can recognize how the Bible has been grossly misinterpreted throughout history to gird murderous missions. She tells her story in surprisingly jaunty prose, eloquent without self-pity. Describing life as a depressed single mother on welfare, for example, she notes, “I simply needed to muster the guts to embrace lifeʼs emptiness.” A long, fraught journey into the light, chronicled with compassion and spirit. (Agent: Bonnie Solow/Solow Literary Enterprises)

    PUBLISHERʼS WEEKLY REVIEW

    The religion depicted in this absorbing memoir of falsehood and betrayal is fundamentalism gone berserk: it has turned into an inhuman, apocalyptic, darkly controlling force that reshuffles common sense. After indoctrination at a Bible college, Cross finds herself in a marriage from hell replete with abuse, addictions and mental illness. Her husband, a popular young pastor, uses religion to mask the alternate reality he has created, a netherworld that will potentially destroy not only his career but the entire familyʼs safety and sanity. With the courage of a trapped animal, Cross reinvents her life, waiting tables and going on welfare in order to earn a degree and support her three children. For a time discarding God, the Bible and organized religion along with her malevolent husband, she eventually redefines spirituality as “a road of discovery—not of submission to a rule book.”… Some readers will contend that the fundamentalism she portrays is an aberration, not the norm. Still, her heartfelt condemnation of public hypocrisy couldnʼt be more timely. In her ex-husbandʼs own self-indicting words: “Isnʼt it ironic, a guy condemning sinful society and completely without a conscience himself?”

    JOHN DE GRAAFʼS REVIEW

    (Author of Affluenza, Take Back Your Time, and award winning Television Producer of Affluenza and Escape from Affluenza, among many others.)—Wow! Thatʼs my response to Fleeing Fundamentalism. If this powerful, poignant first-person tale isnʼt a best seller, thereʼs no justice in publishing. It should be required reading for those who believe politics should be based on a literal reading of the Bible, and the rest of us must read it as a warning about where religious fanaticism might take us. Carlene Cross has seen it all from the inside, and she pulls no punches in revealing the seamy side of intolerance. But in the end, this book is inspiring, not pessimistic as the author escapes the rigid confines of fundamentalism and finds a new faith in life, love, learning, humanity and the spirit of creation.

  4. Julia Scheeres, author of Jesus Land: A Memoir, published in both the U.S. and Britain. Praised by book reviewers of major newspapers in the U.S. See the video trailer at her website!

    Julia writes, “I was born in Lafayette, Indiana. My grade school was Lafayette Christian and my church Lafayette Christian Reformed. The memoir I wrote is about my close relationship with my adopted brother David. It covers our Calvinist upbringing in Indiana and our stint at a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic as teens. “The Program” practiced at that Christian reform school made me lose my faith. The abuse I witnessed in the name of God made me resent organized religion and especially Christian fundamentalists. Of course I pretended to believe in God to get out of there quicker—you must conform to their religious ideology to graduate. The Christian reform school to which I was sent, Escuela Caribe, is a miserable place founded on the concept that all students who are sent down there are “bad kids” who need to be punished. It doesnʼt take into consideration that many children come from homes where they were physically, sexually or emotionally abused, or that some students have documented mental health problems. NHYMʼs one-size-fits-all program is a simplistic approach to complicated issues. But itʼs also convenient dumping ground for wealthy evangelicals who donʼt want to deal with their troublesome teens. The image of the teacher punching my little brother in the stomach, and my helplessness at not being able to defend or comfort him, will haunt me forever. It reminds me why itʼs important to expose the truth about NHYM, and possibly spare other children from similar abuse”.

    From : Robert Wilbur
    Sent : Monday, June 5, 2006 1:18 PM
    Dear Mr. Babinski,
    “Thank you for your recent attention in one of your blog posts to Ms. Julia Scheeresʼ book, “Jesus Land.” This subject needs as much publicity as possible, as Escuela Caribé is but one of hundreds of such camps operating both in the U.S. and abroad under the auspices of American organizations. My fiancé is another survivor of Escuela Caribé, and I can tell you that the abuse described by Ms. Scheeres, who was a “high-leveller,” is even worse for those like my fiancé, who was a “zero-leveller.” Any publicity of the abuse perpetrated by Mr. Redwine and New Horizons Youth Ministries is welcome as another chip away at the edifice of abuse built by these horrendous people, and a step closer to outlawing these type of horrific institutions. Again, thank you for your attention to this issue.
    Sincerely yours,
    Robert Allen Wilbur”

    Stop institutionalized child abuse!

  5. Christine Rosen—Author of My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir Of A Divine Girlhood.

    Link to her book.

    “Itʼs a touching, funny memoir of growing up in St. Petersburg, Florida, in a household, school, and town of flourishing Biblical literalism.” A recent audio presentation on All Things Considered, Dec 28th, 2005, features the author.

    Memoir Recalls “My Fundamentalist Education

  6. Lanakila—Wife of a minister, wrote,

    “I was a moderator at Christian Forums where I debated atheists in the General Apologetics section. But I deconverted while still taking an external degree program hosted by Liberty University (Jerry Falwellʼs fundamentalist institution). I stopped believing while taking a class called ‘Fundamental Theological Issues’ taught by Christian apologist and author, Dr. Gary Habermas. Back when I was a moderator for Christian Forums I started a thread on Jesus being God, using Dr. Habermasʼs book as the basis for my arguments. Habermas is an excellent debater but the facts arenʼt on his side. His ‘proof-texting’ as well as his other arguments, consisted of circular reasoning, but it took a while for me to figure that out. Lately I have been posting at some of the atheist chatrooms after letting my Christian friends at Christian Forums know about my change of mind. I just donʼt believe in the God I followed for 18 years, even after trying hard to continue to believe.”

  7. Marlene Winell—Author of Leaving The Fold: A Guide For Former Fundamentalists And Others Leaving Their Religion.

    Marlene Winellʼs website

    “Marlene is the daughter of a missionary and now a psychologist. She had a genuine ‘born again’ Christian experience and then much later went through another rebirth and found herself apart from that tradition. Today she holds counseling sessions and workshops for ‘recovering fundamentalists’ or anyone who has left an authoritarian belief system and would like to accelerate their personal growth. “I believe these belief systems foster separation—from the self, from others, and from the world. After leaving, a major task is to heal and strengthen these connections.”

  8. Ellen Kamentsky—Author of Hawking God: A Young Jewish Womanʼs Ordeal In Jews For Jesus.

    Her web site

    “Her smiling face appeared in a ‘Jews for Jesus’ advertisement in Newsweek magazine (Dec. 7, 1987). But later she wrote a book explaining why she entered and exited that ‘Messianic Jewish’ organization: ‘I handed out thousands of pamphlets and gathered hundreds of phone numbers praying that God would send open victims across my path. I was a religious fanatic. I believed all people who did not accept my truth were going to Hell. Mine was no nine to five calling. I was always on call, praying, preaching, looking for converts… Members of Jews for Jesus are masters of disguise. They hide their true nature (sometimes even from themselves) and present a carefully contrived image to the world. Groups like them work by preying on our religious doubts and exploiting our insecurities. They seek simple answers to complex questions. They use dogmatism to produce certainty. Today, I revere reasoning and celebrate my Jewishness. I hope this book encourages people to find and celebrate their own truth. Know yourself, discover your own truth, so when someone approaches you hawking God, you can say, ‘Thank you very much, but Iʼm finding my own way’.” Excerpt from Hawking God: A Young Jewish Womanʼs Ordeal In Jews For Jesus.

    Additional books and websites that contain information about ExJewsForJesus: “ExJewsForJesus: True Stories By Those Who Worked for Jews for Jesus”

  9. Jo Ann Schneider Farris—Author of Sentenced For Life—A Story Of An Entry And An Exit Into The World Of Fundamentalist Christianity And Jews For Jesus.
    Her B&N Space

    Itʼs the story of how Ms. Farris became involved with (and controlled by) organized religion. The author went from being a competitive figure skater to a cog in the wheel of born-again Christianity. You will see the inside of the Jews for Jesus ministry and learn about the abuse and control she experienced in that organization, but also laugh at the fun she experienced as a member of a group that instilled a deep sense of belonging of being “insiders,” and “saved.” Also available by digital download.

  10. Ruth Irene Garrett—Author (with Rick Farrant) of Crossing Over: One Womanʼs Escape From Amish Life; And Also, Born Amish.

    Reviews Of Her Books are here and here.

    One reviewer stated: Born Amish is a nicely balanced book. It doesnʼt hesitate to point out problems, conflicts, and contradictions in Amish society. At the same time, she doesnʼt downplay the sense of satisfaction which so many Amish experience because of the lifestyle. Small, close-knit communites can be incredibly supportive, but also incredibly repressive. For every ideal people have about mythical small towns, there is something equally awful about them.

  11. Pauline A. Blankenship—Author of The Hellfire Preachers (ISBN: 187772906X Aardvark Publishers, 1990), a novel based on the real-life experiences of a woman who grew up in a fundamentalist church in east Texas.

  12. Marlene Younger, Oaks—Author of Old Time Religion Is A Cult (1985), whose testimony also appeared in Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists (1995).

  13. Sue Monk Kidd—Author of The Dance Of The Dissident Daughter: A Womanʼs Journey From Christian Tradition To The Sacred Feminine.

    Her web site.

    Well known in traditional Christian circles for her inspirational essays and nonfiction spiritual memoirs such as, When The Heart Waits (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), Sue was raised in the conservative South; attended charm school; had ministers in her family,including the man she married. In fact she spent nearly her first forty years in the Baptist church where women are exhorted to “submit” to their husbands and where she heard the phrase, “second in creation, first to sin,” countless times. Disgruntled with her churchʼs stance on women, she never felt moved to rock the boat much, until one day she walked into her daughterʼs work and found two customers sexually harassing the girl. Something snapped inside Sue, and she began to question her religionʼs assumptions about gender and to seek a more feminist spirituality. She discovered an alternative religious tradition that spoke more strongly to her spiritual longings, a nontraditional feminine religious journey, encountering along the way some of the most powerful feminist religious voices of her times, from Phyllis Trible to Carol Christ. The nonfiction memoir of that journey she titled, The Dance Of The Dissident Daughter: A Womanʼs Journey From Christian Tradition To The Sacred Feminine (1996).

    In 1997 she began writing her first novel, The Secret Life Of Bees, and worked on it for the next three and a half years. Published by Viking in 2002, it became a genuine literary phenomenon. A powerful story of coming-of- age, race-relations, the ability of love to transform our lives and the often unacknowledged longing for the universal feminine divine, the novel tells the story of a fourteen year old Lily, who runs away with her black housekeeper in 1964 in South Carolina and the sanctuary they both find in the home of three eccentric beekeeping sisters. The Secret Life of Bees has sold more than 4.5 million copies, spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list and been published in more than 23 languages.

    Sueʼs second novel, The Mermaid Chair, has sold more than 1.5 million copies since its publication in the Spring of 2005. It explores a womanʼs pilgrimage to self-belonging, the inner life of mid life marriage, and the little known region in the female soul where the sacred and the erotic intersect. Set on a South Carolina barrier island, it tells the beautiful and haunting story of 42 year old Jessie Sullivan, a married woman who falls in love with a Benedictine monk and the crisis and self-awakening this ignites. The Mermaid Chair reached the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list soon after publication and remained on the list for six months. Winner of the 2005 Quill Award for General Fiction, the novel is being translated into 23 languages.

    Sue also signed a contract with Riverhead Books for a new spiritual memoir to be co-written with her thirty year old daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor. They describe the book, which is yet to be titled, as a “mother-daughter, spiritual, travel memoir.” It will tell the story of a series of pilgrimages that Sue and Ann made together through Greece, France, Turkey, and Switzerland, which began when Ann graduated from college and Sue turned fifty. The journeys turned out to be powerful initiations. Ann was looking for a way to cross into young womanhood and Sue was seeking a way into older womanhood. The book will chronicle these passages and also capture the metamorphosis of their own mother-daughter relationship.

  14. Dr. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott—Author of Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach
    web site

    Ms. Mollenkott attended and taught at Bob Jones University and also at Shelton (Carl MacIntireʼs fundamentalist Christian school) in New Jersey. Dr. Mollenkott was a professor at BJU in the 1950s when Barbara Allen (see above) was a student there. Dr. Mollenkott reviewed Barbara Allenʼs book, Still Christian After All These Years, for The Other Side magazine. Dr. Mollenkott chose not to mention the years she taught at BJU in her curriculum vitae, though her vitae does mention the following major achievements: Professor Emeritus at the William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. With Letha Dawson Scanzoni, she co-authored Is The Homosexual My Neighbor? A Positive Christian Response (1978)—available in a vastly expanded and updated edition(1994); The Divine Feminine: Biblical Imagery Of God As Female; Godding: Human Responsibility And The Bible; and, Sensuous Spirituality: Out From Fundamentalism.

    Served as stylistic consultant for the New International Version of the Bible and was a member of the National Council of Churchesʼ Inclusive Language Lectionary Committee. Her Milton Scholarship is discussed in “A Milton Encyclopedia;” her earlier writings are described in “American Women Writers.” In 1992 she received an Achievement Award from New Jerseyʼs Lesbian and Gay Coalition, and in 1999 a Lifetime Achievement Award from SAGE (Senior Action in a Gay Environment). Mollenkottʼs twelfth book, “Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach,” has been warmly welcomed by pastoral counselors, theologians, psychologists, and GLBT people of various religious backgrounds as well as by people working for sexual and gender justice.

  15. Dr. Daphne Hampson—Author of After Christianity (a new edition appeared in 2002, check amazon.comʼs website in the U.K., not the U.S.); and, Christian Contradictions: The Structures Of Lutheran And Catholic Thought

    Former Anglican theologian (today a university professor of theology and a feminist, but no longer a Christian). She now believes that Christianity is both immoral and untrue: “Once people form the ethical judgment that Christianity is a masculinist religion… they have clear eyes to see that Christianity cannot possibly be true.” See her book, After Christianity (a new edition appeared in 2002 from SCM Press, check amazon.comʼs website in the U.K., not the U.S.). And in 2004 Cambridge Univ. Press published Dr. Hampsonʼs, Christian Contradictions: The Structures Of Lutheran And Catholic Thought that argues Catholicism and Protestantism are not one but two highly distinctive religions (there are excerpts on the web), just google her by name.

  16. Dr. Uta Ranke-Heinemann (Uta Johanna Ingrid Heinemann)—Author of Eunuchs For The Kingdom Of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, And The Catholic Church; And, Putting Away Childish Things.

    The first female Catholic theologian for the world, she was stripped of her departmental chair and license to preach by the Cardinal of Essen after she publicly doubted Maryʼs virginity (1987). She had doubts concerning other orthodox interpretations of religious dogmas as well, and raised them in Eunuchs For The Kingdom Of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, And The Catholic Church; and in an even more intensely questioning work, Putting Away Childish Things.

  17. Karen Armstrong—Author of The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out Of Darkness.

    Former Catholic nun in a teaching order who later pursued a doctorate at Oxford in English, then still later became the bestselling author of such works as A History Of God; The Battle For God; A Short History Of Myth; The Great Transformations: The Beginning Of Our Religious Traditions; (not to forget one of her earliest and most searing works) The Gospel According To Woman, and her memoir of life as a Catholic nun and leaving the Catholic fold, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out Of Darkness; Today she calls herself, “flippantly, a freelance monotheist.”

  18. Joanne H. Meehl—Editor of The Recovering Catholic: Personal Journeys Of Women Who Left The Church (Prometheus Books, 1995)—Addresses a wide variety of topics including the reasons why women begin to question their faith, the heavy burden of religious guilt, the attitudes of the Catholic hierarchy toward women, and the escalating amount of sexual abuse cases involving priests. Meehl also discusses the Churchʼs obsession with sex and the discrimination women feel because they are not included as full members of the faith. She includes some practical advice on breaking away from the Church including how to confront your family with the news that you are no longer a Catholic as well as information on choosing new spiritual outlets. Unlike other books on the Catholic Church, The Recovering Catholic is the first to focus on the individual journeys of women, who faced not only what they thought to be discriminatory practices and oppressive dogma, but the ire of family and society in their search for a spiritual happy ending. The Recovering Catholic illustrates how these women successfully left the Church and found new avenues for their faith.

    As often as not, the women quoted have already moved on, most of them into Universalist Unitarian congregations or into one of 13 other alternatives profiled briefly by Meehl, alternatives that vary from Judaism to Jehovahʼs Witnesses.

  19. Julia Sweeney—Star of her one-woman show, “Letting Go of God.” Former Catholic; former cast-member of Saturday Night Live.
    Her web site.

  20. Mary Daly—Author of Amazon Grace: Re-Calling The Courage To Sin Big.
    Her web page

    Former Catholic theologian. She obtained her B.A. in English from The College of Saint Rose, her M.A. in English from The Catholic University of America, and a doctorate in religion from St. Maryʼs College. She later obtained three doctorates in sacred theology and philosophy from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She also taught at Boston College for 33 years but was forcibly retired from that Jesuit-run institution in 1999 for her pro-feminist views. Mary is a prolific author (and imaginative wordsmith) who has published eight radical elemental feminist books, many of them having been bestsellers: The Church And The Second Sex; Beyond God The Father: Toward A Philosophy Of Womenʼs Liberation; Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics Of Radical Feminism; Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy; Websterʼs First New Intergalactic Wickedary Of The English Language (conjured in cahoots with Jane Caputi—“mercilessly exposes the patriarchal house of cards that has become common language usage”); Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage; Quintessence… Realizing The Archaic Future (And In 2006) Amazon Grace: Re-Calling The Courage To Sin Big.

  21. Barbara Allen—“I was a student at Bob Jones University [a fundamentalist Christian institution of higher learning] in 1956, married a staff member and had my first child at the Bob Jones University hospital. Divorced after 18 years, I married a Catholic dropout and found a spiritual home in the Episcopal church. I wrote a book titled, Still Christian After All These Years, about my long and painful progress from being raised in a rigid fundamentalist home to my adult embrace of a generous, loving Anglican Christianity, including my Bob Jones experience, accompanying my pastor husband to a dizzying number of small churches, having a nervous breakdown, going back to school, and taking my first halting steps toward a joyful independence. The book arose out of a series of essays I wrote as a Lenten discipline a couple of years ago, on what I believe and why. It was originally intended to be just between my priest and I, but the weekly essays morphed into a book. It has been reviewed in The Other Side magazine by feminist author Dr. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott (who taught at Bob Jones many years ago, but chooses not to advertise that fact on her curriculum vitae). Another irony, my ex-father-in-law died and, because he was dear to my heart, I wrote a short eulogy and shared it with my sons. One of them read it at the funeral at Bob Jones University. My words from that male bastion pulpit! And they wonʼt even let me past the gate because I wrote a cover story for Atlanta Magazine back when Bob Jones University had a case before the Supreme Court and, although I thought the story fair and balanced, they never forgave me. (They keep lists of nair do wells at their gates and make cars pause before they lift the gates and ask visitors their names. On the other hand, their black list reads like a Whoʼs Who of Christianity, so Iʼm sort of honored). Iʼve been wondering if there is a BJU alumnae Recovery group on the web.”

Miscellaneous

LorentzHA, Electric Kool-Aid Girl, Nov. 3, 2003 at Christian Forums, writes:

“Hi All, I am a 33 year old female. I live in Texas. I am an ex-Christian, Thank God. I really do not mind Christianity—the premise is a good one, but it rarely works that way. I really did not care for the self righteous, hypocritical people that preach love and tolerance but are anything BUT! I think Creationists who believe in a 6,000 year old Earth are absurd. I do believe in a higher power—I just am not sure whom or what that is. One saying I have encountered here in Texas that I find odd is, ‘I know you must be a Christian because you are so nice.’ So… non-Christians cannot be nice people?”


In Who Shall Lead Them? The Future Of Ministry In America

Larry A. Witham writes:

Some male preachers have assured women that motherhood is more influential, for “training in the salvation of her children is mighty and decisive; the influence of the minister over his hundreds is slight.” Yet M. Madeline Southard, who organized the American Association of Women Ministers, was not mollified by such praise for the fairer sex.

“Men were not disturbed when women washed the worldʼs dirty clothes and scrubbed dirty office floors,” she said in 1921. Only when women sought careers did “they became fearful of what would happen to their children and their femininity.”

Since the early 1980s, secular feminists have written widely about an organized “backlash” as women compete with men for professional positions or college admissions. Church feminists have argued likewise. They point to cycles of “backlash” every time women clergy entered clerical turf, usually when economic forces and womenʼs rights movements coincided (such as the 1880s, 1920ʼs, and 1950ʼs).

As feminist church writer Paula D. Nesbitt argues, “For women clergy, the good news that backlash movements offer is that women have made sufficient cultural and organizational strides in challenging the prevailing norms that they are perceived as a significant force to fend off.”


Women And The Vatican

Laywomen, who might have exerted a civilizing influence, were present in the Vatican in pitifully small numbers. The contemptuous way in which they were treated revealed the misogynist culture that prevailed. A former secretary, now living in Switzerland, reported that she was treated more like a slave than a human being and that she was literally locked in her office each day by her boss, a distinguished Dominican priest-theologian, and had to knock to be allowed to go to the bathroom.

Another told me that after she was appointed personal assistant to an archbishop, officials were in the habit of opening the door to her office and staring at her in sullen silence. When she went to the Vatican cafeteria, male bureaucrats would move away if she sat close to them.

- John Cornwell, The Pontiff in Winter: Triumph and Conflict in the Reign of John Paul II


Excerpt from The People Of Opus Dei, here.

April 15, 2006

Opus Dei requires a deep commitment - especially for members called numeraries. They live and work in Opus Dei centers like their headquarters in New York. “I would say the 20 years I was in Opus Dei was up and down. Very up and very down,” says a woman who goes by “Jane.” Jane asked CBS News to hide her identity. She joined Opus Dei right out of High School, working as a live-in cook and housekeeper at Opus Dei centers across the country. She says she handed almost every cent she earned back to the group. “The striving for perfection it becomes very all consuming to the point where common sense just doesnʼt come into play. And I donʼt think that was a good thing,” says Jane. Jane claims to have become so occupied with her work and prayer schedule that she went three years without speaking to her parents. A year ago they hired a cult-deprogrammer to convince her to quit. Now sheʼs pulling herself together in the Ozark Mountains. “When you are in Opus Dei, you are afraid to leave because you think that you are going to hell for not doing godʼs will,” she says.


For Contrast See The Book, Still Believing: Jewish, Christian, And Muslim Women Affirm Their Faith (Faith Meets Faith Series) by Victoria Lee Erickson (Editor), Susan A. Farrell (Editor) (Orbis Books, May 15, 2005), 154 pgs.

Also see, Women Who Leave The Fold by Edward T. Babinski