Growing Up Fundie: The Painful Impact of Conservative Religion

When I expressed interest to them in sharing their stories, there was one common response from all of the subjects: every single one of them wanted to remain anonymous. Despite having left their religions, they remain fearful of judgment, of being found out, and of disappointing their families. So in each case, the names used are not their real names.
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Unfortunately, racism still permeates even in the most progressive cultures. According to Lifeway Research, Sunday morning is one of the most segregated times in America, with churches by and large existing without diversity. And even though I like to think of my particular fundamentalist religion as more advanced, the truth is that when my sister started dating a boy who was black, there was some hateful push back against it from members of our church and older relatives. Now that they’re married, the same people pretend there was never an issue.
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She ended up relocating several times during her childhood, so she attended churches of varying denominations, like Baptist and Assemblies of God. At the age of thirteen, she was accused by her youth pastor of witchcraft for causing a sixteen year-old boy to “sin.” But she still saw herself as a Christian. In fact, she decided, along with her high school boyfriend, to attend a Christian university and become missionaries together.

However, when she was exposed to the missionary curriculum and met actual missionaries, she felt repulsed by their arrogant, colonialist attitudes. The professors, former missionaries in some cases, were rude and judgmental about the same people they claimed to serve. She switched her major to anthropology. And at age nineteen, she stopped going to church.

Growing Up Fundie: The Painful Impact of Conservative Religion

Why Don’t Women Just Leave Fundamentalism?

I saw in fundamentalism a very clear life script and assurances that I didn’t have otherwise.. There wasn’t much about me that fit into my new faith system’s expectations for women, who were pushed into cookie-cutter molds and made to feel terribly guilty if they couldn’t fit. I tried my best. Outside of fundamentalism, I didn’t know how I was supposed to act or when it was okay to speak definitively or stand up for myself. But within fundamentalism, the rules were crystal-clear. If they were also impossible to fulfill, well, that was sorta my problem.

I didn’t notice that the demands were unreasonable, only that I finally had a clear vision of how to achieve respect and standing in my community. I didn’t have much else going for me. My church discouraged all clubs and community activities that weren’t part of their world; I was at church most days of the week, sometimes for many hours at a time. I volunteered extensively and studied my Bible in my off-time–and most of it while attending school full-time! Though I did well in classes, all that really mattered to me was my “walk”–meaning my spiritual life and devotions. I wanted the approval and admiration of my peers and leaders–and I wanted to have what all of them seemed to have: this deep, rich, two-way communication with “God.” I ached and hungered for it, and assumed that once I figured out what I was doing wrong, I’d find it. (Much later I’d discover that many of them were “speaking truth to power”–or in other words, faking it till they made it. At the time, I trusted that they were all being perfectly honest about their experiences and that I was the only one experiencing anything different.)

And, too, fundamentalism fit in very well with my very black-and-white way of looking at the world, and gave me a great deal of certainty about that world. Nobody ever has to wonder about much of anything in fundamentalism, or struggle with difficult questions. Every answer was easy and simple–even if putting that answer into motion was impossible, at which point the problem was me, not the answer, which was seen as totally infallible and unquestionable.
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So when someone says, all exasperated, “Why do so many women stay in a religion that unfair?” I’ll tell ‘em exactly why at least this woman stayed as long as she did.

I was afraid of so many things. I craved security. I wanted safety. I needed structure. I ached to see the reality of the spiritual world I’d been taught since toddlerhood existed all around me. I wanted to be part of something much bigger than myself.

Why Don’t Women Just Leave Fundamentalism?

Supernatural 'Jinn' Seen as Cause of Mental Illness Among Muslims

Back in early June. I posted about this paper which described the symptomatology of schizophrenia and delusional disorders, talking a little bit about what a “demonic” experience might be like.

It now seems we have another attempt coming from researchers in the Netherlands although this paper seems more focused:

Across societies, beliefs in the supernatural as well as other aspects of culture may influence how mental disorders manifest, the study said. Previous research has found that people with schizophrenia may experience different delusions depending on their cultures. For example, fears about technology and surveillance play a large part in the delusions of people with schizophrenia in the United States. Meanwhile, in Japan, which has an honor-oriented culture, patients' delusions more commonly involve fears about public humiliation.

It may be common for psychiatric patients who are Muslim to attribute their hallucinations or other symptoms to "jinn," the invisible, devilish creatures in Islamic mythology, researchers in the Netherlands have found.

The findings demonstrate one way in which culture may influence how people perceive their psychotic symptoms, and could help Western psychiatrists better understand patients who have an Islamic background.

Moreover, in today's connected world, patients may fuse the symbols from their own backgrounds with those of other cultures to explain their symptoms, study leader Dr. Jan Dirk Blom, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Groningen, told Live Science.

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To get a better idea of how commonly Muslim psychiatric patients consider jinn in the course of their diseases, the researchers looked into the scientific literature. They found 105 articles about jinn and their relationship with mental disorders, including 47 case reports. About 66 percent of those reports included a medical diagnosis. Nearly half of the cases involved a person with schizophrenia or a related disorder, while the rest of the patients had mood disorders, epilepsy or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

"The available literature suggests that the attribution of psychiatric symptoms to jinn is common in some Muslim populations," the researchers wrote in their review, published July 30 in the journal Transcultural Psychiatry.

"Since Western health professionals tend to be unfamiliar with this attribution style, diagnosis may prove quite challenging — especially when the patient-physician encounter is already impeded by language problems and cultural differences or biases," the researchers said.

Moreover, findings from several case reports suggested that the attribution of psychiatric symptoms to jinn also affects the treatment and course of patients' mental disorders, the researchers said.

Supernatural 'Jinn' Seen as Cause of Mental Illness Among Muslims

See also:  Real-Life Werewolves: Psychiatry Re-Examines Rare Delusion

9 Truly Evil Things Right-Wing Christians Do | Alternet

Christians may be a super majority in the U.S. They may control the U.S. Congress and, as we all were reminded recently, the Supreme Court. But that hasn’t stopped Bible believers from preparing their children for martyrdom. Web resources abound for church youth leaders who want to make sure their young charges are ready when the lions come for them. Titles include, “Expect to be Persecuted” “Persecution Equals Reward” and “Adventure Game—Persecution of Christians and Paul of Tarsus.”

Stuff Fundies Like is a blog by and for people coming out of the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist tradition. Recently one former Baptist told how his high school youth group had been divided into two groups, assigned to play the roles of persecutors and martyrs. In 2012 a youth pastor in Pennsylvania made international news by staging the kidnapping of his young charges to help prepare them for the horrors to come.

The Christian persecution complex is absurd. Modern American Christians are not persecuted or under attack. But for Christians who are truly concerned about hostility toward their faith, I have a bit of advice: Don’t be evil. And don’t let your co-religionists get away with being evil either.

No, really.

In the book of Matthew, Jesus gives his disciples a lot of contradictory advice. Modern day followers pick and choose, but one piece that often gets ignored is this: Be harmless as doves. This advice is not only profoundly moral; it is profoundly self-protective. Far fewer people would be entertaining themselves with fantasies about lions if more Christians took this little nugget seriously. A huge part of the antagonism that even moderate Christians face from outsiders is due to the fact that too many devout believers claim a righteous mandate to say and do things that are truly horrible.

Let me spell it out,,,

9 Truly Evil Things Right-Wing Christians Do | Alternet

ADDENDUM::Journal Under Fire For Linking Schizophrenia to Demonic Possession

Curtis Hart, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Religion and Health and lecturer in public health at Weill Cornell Medical College, told Real Clear Science that he stands behind Irmak’s paper and has no plans to retract it. “The article was published in hopes that it would provoke discussion,” he said. “The journal does not agree that demons are a real entity.”

Hart might see the paper’s inclusion as an interesting way to ignite debate, but his peers in the medical community question if it’s a useful one. Dr. Joshua Kantrowitz, director of Columbia University’s Lieber Schizophrenia Research Clinic, dismisses Irmack’s argument as “pretty unfortunate.”

“With respect, this is a way to attract eyes to their journal and not necessarily a legitimate scientific debate,” he says. “People with schizophrenia are prescribed antipsychotics, and they work for most. As the article correctly cites, they don’t work for everybody, but I think it’s a pretty big leap to jump to the explanation offered. There didn’t seem to be much actual evidence or science behind what the author was saying.”

Journal Under Fire For Linking Schizophrenia to Demonic Possession

ADDENDUM::RealClearScience - Published Paper Blames Schizophrenia on Demons

THE EDITOR OF the Journal of Religion and Health is Dr. Curtis Hart, a lecturer in public health at Weill Cornell Medical College. RealClearScience reached out to him for comment.

"The article was published in hopes that it would provoke discussion," he said. "The Journal does not agree that demons are a real entity."

There are currently no plans to retract the paper, but two rebuttals are already slated for a future issue, Curtis added. The journal's publisher, Springer, recently made headlines by withdrawing 16 gibberish papers spotted by an independent computer scientist. The nonsense papers were created with a computer program, SciGen.

RCS gave Irmak a chance to defend his paper.

"There is no scientific evidence to support the existence of demons," he admitted. "This is like the argument of creation or evolution. It is a matter of belief and I think the existence of demons cannot be proved by scientific methods."

For the record, there is an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence in support of evolution, which is not at all a matter of belief.

Irmak also insisted that readers of his paper watch the Academy Award-winning film A Beautiful Mind, which chronicles the life of genius mathematician John Nash, who suffers from schizophrenia.

"I think the creatures who disturb John Nash are demons," he said.

http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/06/published_scientific_paper_blames_schizophrenia_on_demons.html

RealClearScience - Published Paper Blames Schizophrenia on Demons

New paper says maybe mental condition really IS demons | Doubtful News

Kudos to Sharon Hill over at Doubtful News for this gem,,,

Long ago, before modern medical understanding, people thought that various conditions such as mental illness and brain disorders like seizures were caused by demons. Those days have long past. Maybe not in the religious-minded. Note that this article comes from High Council of Science, Gulhane Military Medical Academy, Ankara, Turkey. Turkey is a hotbed of Muslim fundamentalism.

The Journal is peer-reviewed including reports on “contemporary modes of religious and spiritual thought with particular emphasis on their relevance to current medical and psychological research.” Articles deal with mental and physical health in relation to religion and spirituality of all kinds. Therefore, that might explain why such a piece is published – that even contemporary (backwards) religions are returning to pre-scientific explanations.

I can’t fathom how such a paper would contain anything but speculation. The medical data nor any other scientific evidence anywhere in no way supports the reality of supernatural entities as a cause of human harm. Belief, however, causes havoc.

I was half tempted to pay the $40 to purchase this paper until reading K Friesen's comment,

,,,it is definitely not peer reviewed. For that matter, there is scarcely anything in the paper – no methods, numbers, statistics, nothing even about “spiritual treatment”. The five pages of this paper (three if you don’t include the abstract and references) basically describe the symptomatology of schizophrenia and delusional disorders, talk a little bit about what a “demonic” experience might be like. To be a bit balanced, this article is under a subheading of “Psychological Exploration”

Sorry forty bucks for five pages of dreck is not worth the price no matter how "enlightening" it may be.

A few thoughts to ponder,,,

A point that HIll makes, "[w]hen people believe this is religious cause, it will encourage exorcisms. Exorcisms are downright deadly." To which Improbable Research, cited by Hill, ends with this question, "The new theory raises an enigmatic question : if medication helps patients, is it acting on the patients themselves, or on the demons which possess them?

It is my question of which came first, religious belief or mental illness? In my humble opinion, the belief that one is demonically possessed is often a symptom of schizophrenia. "My feelings and movements are controlled by others in a certain way” and “They put thoughts in my head that are not mine.” Compare also to what some say in regards to aliens and demonology, Bill Alnor for example in a 2009 lecture [from my other blog].

A second point, if one looks at the references cited by the paper talked about by HIll some of the references are to sources specifically about the Near Eastern or Islamic belief jinn.

Whether Christian or Islamic, belief in demonic possession will lead to catastrophic results as I have many times highlighted.

New paper says maybe mental condition really IS demons | Doubtful News

Salon jumps the shark, becomes official secular atheist-bashing site « Why Evolution Is True

Jerry Coyne responds,,,

,,,O’Hehir’s piece says absolutely nothing new, but simply reiterates the idea that fundamentalism is dumb, but not all religion is fundamentalism, that the New Atheists like Dawkins and Harris attack religion as if it were fundamentalism, and therefore they’re dumb too. Have you heard that one lately? O’Hehir’s looking for some kind of middle ground between science and religion, but, bizarrely, admits in the end that it doesn’t seem to exist. I wonder why that is?

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Yes, we have had this debate, and it has continued, though I don’t think it was more active in the 18th and 19th centuries than it is now. And no, it’s not more stupid this time around, because we know a lot more about science, and we’ve seen how science has made even more hash of religious claims. And note how O’Hehir implies that he, but nobody else engaged in these arguments, understands their philosophical and theological history. Such hauteur! In fact, many of the New Atheist arguments against religion are either the old and supposedly “less stupid” ones (viz. those of Russell or Hume), or newer responses to the defensive but unconvincing lucubrations of Sophisticated Theologians.™ You want stupid? Pick your side: Karen Armstrong or Steven Weinberg.

O’Hehir does indeed go after “young earth creationism” and its spinoffs, but then says that these worldviews are “a tiny fringe” movement in Christianity, implying that most decent Christians are of the liberal Eagleton stripe. He fails to note that 46% of Americans—hardly a tiny fringe minority—are indeed young-earth creationists when it comes to human evolution; that about 70% of us believe in Satan, angels, and Hell; and that 30% of Americans see the Bible as the direct word of God, while another 49% see it as “inspired by the word of God.” O’Hehir clearly doesn’t get out enough, but at least he notes some of the dangers of melding Christianity and politics. Yet even those he hedges in a strange way,,,

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If anything is “silly” in all this, it’s O’Hehir’s futile effort to straddle the fence between science and religion. His article comes off as saying nothing beyond “both sides are stupid,” and he offers neither a synthesis nor a cogent analysis of the problem.


Salon jumps the shark, becomes official secular atheist-bashing site « Why Evolution Is True

America: Stupidly stuck between religion and science - Salon.com

Something about this OP is leaving a bad taste in my mouth. It is as if the author has a flippant, nonchalant attitude and doesn't quite grasp the damage being done by this "tiny fringe movement." After reading through the comments I see I am not the only one.

Publicola, sums up one point that made my stomach turn: "By any rational standard these statistics demonstrate that here in American young earth creationism is far from a "tiny fringe movement". I'm surprised and disappointed that O'Hehir didn't bother to check his facts before propagating such an easily refuted falsehood, and that Salon's editors (does Salon even have editors these days?) didn't fact check that one either. In any event far from being a "tiny fringe movement" young earth creationism is a major - and thus quite disturbing, for those of us who subscribe to an Enlightenment-oriented, evidence-based worldview - movement here in the US."

Juck Fesus points to a counter OP by Jerry Coyne which I will be reading and posting a bit later.

This creationist boomlet goes hand in glove with the larger political strategy of Christian fundamentalism, which is somewhere between diabolically clever and flat-out desperate. Faced with a long sunset as a significant but declining subculture, the Christian right has embraced postmodernism and identity politics, at least in the sense that it suddenly wants to depict itself as a persecuted cultural minority entitled to special rights and privileges. These largely boil down, of course, to the right to resist scientific evidence on everything from evolution to climate change to vaccination, along with the right to be gratuitously cruel to LGBT people. One might well argue that this has less to do with the eternal dictates of the Almighty than with anti-government paranoia and old-fashioned bigotry. But it’s noteworthy that even in its dumbest and most debased form, religion still finds a way to attack liberal orthodoxy at its weak point.

Things can’t possibly be as bad on the scientific and rationalist side of the ledger, but they’re still confused and confusing. Tyson has made diplomatic comments about science and religion not necessarily being enemies, a halfway true statement that was never likely to satisfy anybody. (Meanwhile, “Cosmos” thoroughly botched the fascinating and ambiguous story of Giordano Bruno, a cosmological pioneer and heretical theologian burned by the Inquisition.) Tyson was clearly echoing Stephen Jay Gould’s 1997 pronouncement that the two domains were “non-overlapping magisteria,” meaning that science is concerned entirely with empirical questions and religion with questions of morality and ultimate meaning. Even at the time Gould admitted he was being strategic and trying to uphold the social status of science in a deeply religious nation (although he also defended his doctrine on philosophical grounds). At best, he was outlining a tentative truce between certain areas of scientific inquiry and a certain strain of up-market orthodox Christian and Jewish theology — the once-dominant tradition of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas — that has been willing to accommodate scientific discovery and has tended to avoid unequivocal pronouncements about the nature of reality.

Creationists and other Biblical fundamentalists, needless to say, are having none of it: For them, the empirical realm is always and everywhere subservient to the revealed word of God. Meanwhile “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, along with their pop-culture sock puppet Bill Maher, espouse a similar view from the other direction. Their ahistorical or anti-historical depiction of religion is every bit as stupid as Ken Ham’s. Since there is nothing outside the empirical realm and no questions that can resist rational inquiry, the so-called domain of religion does not even exist. These debased modern-day atheists conflate all religion with its most stereotypical, superstitious and oppressive dogmas – a mistake that Nietzsche, the archangel of atheism, would never have made – and refuse to acknowledge that human life possesses a sensuous, symbolic and communal aspect that religion has channeled and accessed in a way no other social practice ever has. Strangely, their jeremiads urging the sheeple to wake from their God-haunted torpor haven’t won many converts.

America: Stupidly stuck between religion and science - Salon.com