In hindsight I'm so actively angry at the kind of shit they did to indoctrinate us in Sunday school "Sword drills" (based on the Word of God being the "sword of the Spirit" in Ephesians 6:17) where you just rote memorized Bible verses as a challenge to get candy
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof and
And it's not even the rote memorization that gets me It's that it's an *arbitrary list of verses collated by the teacher* Random one-line snippets from a dozen different documents written hundreds of years apart in wildly different contexts that all contain the word "love"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof and
Like oh my fucking God Out in the secular world we talk about people who buy books of quotable quotes and just memorize "quotes about the brutality of war" to bust out and sound cool instead of ever actually reading the whole book the quote came from
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof and
Well they were raising whole generations of kids to be that kind of shallow dumb asshole, about their most "sacred" text Because they actively discourage you genuinely thinking and asking questions about what the books mean instead of accepting what the pastor says they mean
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
chrissy stroop talks a bit about this--this thing that outsiders misunderstand about evangelical culture--that it's not ideological (in the way that, say, your meeting of local marxist-leninists might be ideological) but authoritarian
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Replying to @perdricof @iridienne and
The sales pitch for the radical, Zwinglian end of the Protestant Reformation was "every man his own priest", that the tyrannical authority of the hierarchy to interpret Scripture on everyone's behalf would be broken in favor of radical individualism and democracy
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof and
This, of course, did not actually happen, because every individual Christian spending their life studying the Bible and deciding what it means on their own, aspirational an ideal as it may be, is not practical
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof and
Instead -- as corrupt and nasty as those old hierarchs could be -- they were completely vindicated in their predictions of what would happen when this was taken to its full extent Every dipshit half-educated local church pastor becomes a tinpot tyrant of his own flock
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof and
Lacking a big institution with a long institutional memory to at least kind of hold individual egos in check, any vaguely talented dude who wanted to "go into ministry" with minimum Int 10/Wis 8/Cha 12 got to be the Pope of his own tiny fiefdom
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof and
Even as a kid desperately trying to be devout I wasn't very good at being devout because sitting there in the pew I couldn't help but be aware that I was listening to this rando dude give interpretations of an ancient text that were clearly just pulled from his ass
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The urge to talk back to the guy like "What do you know about it? How do you know it? Why, exactly, do you think that Bill Clinton is an analogue for the Pharaoh in Exodus" was overpowering
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