Re: The nature of the Judeo-Christian god : Wed Jun 06, 2012 9:18 am  

Kosh wrote:

Not to mention the rich history of psychopaths and serial killers who all believed that they were following instructions from God. It's almost a classic symptom.

Wasn't that recent massacre in Norway(?) the work of such a person? Kirkstaller would probably say he was within his rights.

Re: The nature of the Judeo-Christian god : Wed Jun 06, 2012 9:33 am  

Rock God X wrote:

Wasn't that recent massacre in Norway(?) the work of such a person?

No it wasn't.

Re: The nature of the Judeo-Christian god : Wed Jun 06, 2012 9:37 am  

Kosh wrote:

I realise that you're incapable of rational thought, but let's pretend for the moment that you are.

I've just seen a random stranger on an internet messageboard post that if he heard an inner voice command him to kill someone he would do so without a second thought. You realise that people have been jailed for less?

Blimey.

Who has been jailed for saying they would commit a crime if something impossible happened? And by that, I mean why would God ask me to kill someone? God would not do that, no way, he loves us all. So basically, what I said was the equivalent of saying I'd rape someone if the sun turned luminous pink tomorrow morning.

Would that be worthy of prison?

Keep them coming

Re: The nature of the Judeo-Christian god : Wed Jun 06, 2012 9:38 am  

Rock God X wrote:

Wasn't that recent massacre in Norway(?) the work of such a person? Kirkstaller would probably say he was within his rights.

No he wouldn't.
The essence of Kirkstaller's belief is that he and only he is the Chosen One who knows the true word as relayed to Him Personally by the son of god. This egocentricity is a hallmark characteristic of the psychopath.

Breivik and others may have similar psychoses (they certainly share his narcissism), but in Kirkstaller's delusional mind they (and their crimes) are an irrelevance.

Re: The nature of the Judeo-Christian god : Wed Jun 06, 2012 9:44 am  

Mintball wrote:

I grew up in a pretty fundamentalist evangelical household. Moving around as much as we did, and with a minister as a father, I never quite got into the relationships with peers that might have hauled me out of it earlier. Church and Sunday school, with Sunshine Corner on a Monday evening; holidays to very religious friends. All sorts of stuff (one bit of the family were Plymouth Brethren).

In my early teens, my parents took me (and my sister) to a series of evangelical crusade meetings over a two-week period (my father was involved in the organisation). In the intensely emotional atmosphere, what my parents wanted to happen did: both of us experienced 'conversion', 'born-again' experiences.

What had been implanted was strengthened.

Now after leaving home some years later, I had given up going to church except occasionally (and when I did, it was high CofE rather than some non-conformist denomination). But the residual stuff clings on. And on. In my case – and I've heard and read that this is very, very similar to those brought up as Catholics – it was the sense of guilt that continued.

I still had a core belief in some sort of god, but nobody challenged that – to be honest, it wasn't something discussed much at all.

And the guilt was certainly not discussed. You don't discuss guilt.

It lasted until I was, in essence, 40. Then one day, I found I was filling in the census and, when I came to the religion question, I realised I was going to answer 'none'. It had gone. With it had finally gone the guilt too.

I suspect that the seed of this finally going was a very brief 'challenge' made by someone I'd met a couple of years earlier. In a conversation, I'd said that I still maintained a belief in a god – and he'd simply asked 'why?' and then dropped the subject. In the back of my mind, I suspect, that had stewed around for the following period.

Interestingly (perhaps!), that same person noted, after this, that it was as though my mind had been 'locked in a cage'. Certainly I'm aware that, within the space of about two years, my personal vocabulary in use expanded massively. It is possibly also no coincidence that, in the years since, I've read more literary fiction than in the entire time since school, and read more non-fiction than in my entire life to that point.

I was angry as all hell for a few years, in particular, feeling – apart from anything else – that my parents had contrived to deny me the chance to have a proper youth (their religiosity was also tied up with great strictness about all manner of thing, including how a 'young lady' was supposed to behave – and, for my mother particularly, how the daughter of a minister was supposed to behave; 'set an example' was, in essence, the answer to that one).

The anger has lifted. As have other things – guilt, believe it or not, at just relaxing. I used to have this deep-seated feeling that, if you went on holiday, you couldn't just stop. You had to Do Things. There's also a residual, secularised version of the religious guilt sometimes: a sense that 'oh god, I'll pay for feeling this happy at some point'. But at least I know and can recognise these things for what they are.

But choice? Nah.

Thank you for self-disclosing with such honesty.

Without being too pyschy, I can see where your projections of anger comes from now.

Re: The nature of the Judeo-Christian god : Wed Jun 06, 2012 9:50 am  

Rock God X wrote:

Wasn't that recent massacre in Norway(?) the work of such a person? Kirkstaller would probably say he was within his rights.

I haven't seen anything about Brevik (sp?) being motivated by some god.

I've already mentioned 9/11, though – those people were.

Re: The nature of the Judeo-Christian god : Wed Jun 06, 2012 9:50 am  

Kosh wrote:

Not to mention the rich history of psychopaths and serial killers who all believed that they were following instructions from God. It's almost a classic symptom.

The Yorkshire Ripper had god talking to him while he was digging graves, I seem to recall

Re: The nature of the Judeo-Christian god : Wed Jun 06, 2012 9:56 am  

kirkstaller wrote:

And by that, I mean why would God ask me to kill someone?

Yeah, I mean, why get you to do it when he could just give them cancer, starve them to death or bury them under a mudslide?

Re: The nature of the Judeo-Christian god : Wed Jun 06, 2012 9:58 am  

Mintball wrote:

I haven't seen anything about Brevik (sp?) being motivated by some god.

I've already mentioned 9/11, though – those people were.

I haven't read much on the case, it was just something I thought I'd heard. Either way, as you and Kosh point out, plenty of others have acted under the belief that they were doing God's work. Would Kirkstaller think that they were right to carry out such orders, or does he, as Stinkwort suggests, believe that he is the only person who can truly speak directly to God?

Re: The nature of the Judeo-Christian god : Wed Jun 06, 2012 10:10 am  

Rooster Booster wrote:

Thank you for self-disclosing with such honesty.

Without being too pyschy, I can see where your projections of anger comes from now.

As I said, it's lessened in the last five or so years as the anger has receded – and it has. I've had to learn a new way to deal with my own family, for starters.

But the thread that led to this really did anger me.

I really don't care what people believe – they can believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden (and some do) if they want and, to coin a cliché, I'll defend their right to do that.

What I dislike intensely is when people try to force their beliefs on people who have other religious beliefs or none. This is nothing new, of course, but after a period of apparent tolerance, we seem to be seeing an increasing rise in religious fundamentalisms* and demands for special rights.

So you get the likes of people demanding that wearing a ring to indicate a commitment to chastity before marriage is recognised as a religious symbol and allowed in schools (I seriously feel for the girl whose parents were behind her pushing this). It has never been any such symbol until recently, when it was deemed so by US Christian fundamentalists – who in the face of all evidence of its counterproductive impact, still claim that abstinence-only sex education is the only acceptable variety.

So this is new. As is this culture of claiming that you can't be allowed near women waiting for an abortion if you're a nurse who has a 'conscience'. We've had legal abortion in the UK for decades and we only appear to have started having such problems in the last few years. Why's that? Were there no nurses of 'conscience' before? Have they only just materialised, along with pharmacists who are refusing on 'conscience' grounds to provide women with emergency contraception.

Where was all this 10, 20, 30 years ago? Why is it visible now?

Kirkstaller is a useful reminder that religious fundamentalism is not just about Islam or the US.

And then there's the arrogance of saying that the suffering of a child is neither here nor there, because heaven will be nice. It beggars belief. Or of telling others that you know enough about their religious experiences to tell them that they 'weren't doing it right'.

The latter feels particularly personal in light of what I've touched on. How dare he claim to (in effect) tell me I wasn't 'doing it right'. How dare he.

And to give more detail, there I was, at around 13, just going through puberty, having already taken onboard the lesson from my father's pulpit and his dinnertime sermons, that sex is sin, and having nobody to turn to and talk to as I started experiencing the mental and emotional aspects of puberty (a cursory check from my mother that I knew what would happen physically); and lying awake at night in a torment and praying – oh, praying so hard, for God to take the dirty feelings away – and no answer; no answer. Just the guilt, seeping deeper and deeper in.

And the growing belief that I was like a leper – yes, that was the word I used to describe myself to myself in my mind: a leper. And it was impossible to talk to anyone because I was unclean – except to God, who simply ignored me.

Of course, that was because no such figures existed. But that's an illustration of how religion does such damage.

But Kirkstaller, in his arrogance, grants himself the same omniscience as his god and declares that he knows that I (and others) were not 'doing it right'. And that would be at the same time as declaring that it was perfectly fine for his god to torture an adolescent like that, because everything'll be nice "in the sweet by and by, when we meet at that beautiful shore".