{"id":9019,"date":"2018-10-18T05:32:33","date_gmt":"2018-10-18T09:32:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=9019"},"modified":"2018-10-18T05:38:59","modified_gmt":"2018-10-18T09:38:59","slug":"quote-for-the-day-138","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=9019","title":{"rendered":"Quote for the day"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The story: I was raised Catholic in the liberal West Coast church of the 1960s and 1970s. I attended Catholic schools through 12th grade, and was taught my religion by a bunch of wonderful nuns who were determined to raise up a student body of social justice warriors. They tended to slide over the parts of the theology that were disconcerting; the important things in life were to take joy in the gifts of God, be properly grateful for them, and put them to the uses he intended. In college I made friends with Evangelical Christians, and discovered there was a whole other Christian religion out there. They seemed to have a more evidence-based faith, one based on the bible<\/span> and not the pronouncements of the church hierarchy. I explored that for a few years. Meanwhile I met and married a man who was raised in an Evangelical tradition but was not religious.<\/p>\n

I got into serious trouble with the Evangelical message. I couldn\u2019t get my mind around the notion that one could take the entire bible literally. And the constant emphasis on sin, and my worthlessness, fed my depression fiercely<\/span>. We were attending church regularly, but my husband finally insisted we quit, because the sermon would leave me in tears of despair; not even God could love someone as worthless as I<\/span>. So I stopped going to church, but the damage was done, and it ate and ate at me for several years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This comes from a brief compendium of comments by a frequent commenter at Bruce Gerencser’s blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I was not raised in the evangelical church, but I now live in Wake Forest, North Carolina, the home of a Southern Baptist seminary, and I am surrounded by bellowing Holy Men whose life’s work is, short version, degrading others in order to later exploit them.<\/p>\n

There was no first couple, there was no Fall, there is no such thing as Original Sin — and there is absolutely no educated, intellectually serious debate about that, even if evangelicals do claim to be evidence-based. The unhappy truth is that the people who believe the Bible is ‘inerrant’ lack the intellectual rigor to sort through and weigh the evidence.<\/p>\n

If you want to do yourself and your children an easy favor, go to the park on Sunday morning instead of church.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The story: I was raised Catholic in the liberal West Coast church of the 1960s and 1970s. I attended Catholic schools through 12th grade, and was taught my religion by a bunch of wonderful nuns who were determined to raise … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9019"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9019"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9023,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9019\/revisions\/9023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}