I was very impressed with this post about what happens when the realities and facts are allowed in. I was amazed that she quoted from the new platform of the Texas Republican party. Guess their backwards stances are becoming known worldwide.
The Dreadful Dangers of Learning to Think: A Cautionary Tale – By Jane Douglas
Here is her quote from the TX platform:
Last week, an article in the Washington Post reported on the 2012 platform of the Republican Party in Texas and, in particular, its scarily backward education agenda. In part, the platform statement reads:
“Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
She agrees that learning thinking skills and gathering facts do indeed empower children to challenge beliefs, and she agrees that is how it should be.
In fact, I considered myself rather intellectually diligent; my faith and the lifestyle I had built around it were sustained by the belief that I had done a great deal of solid thinking about them both. I was a keen Bible student; I understood hermeneutical principles and was quite adept at using scholarly Bible study tools. I believed my views to be founded on solid truths that I had subjected to dispassionate reasoning before I’d embraced them. I could not see that my thinking was bounded by invisible stainless steel walls, that I engaged in rigorous intellectual wrestling only inside terribly narrow boundaries. The myriad assumptions upon which Christianity is based were simply invisible to me.
From where I now stand, I am able to identify some of the things that drew me into Christianity and caused me to cling to it as I did. I was not a loved child. This sad fact found me reaching young adulthood vulnerable and messy, my self-esteem negligible. I was ripe for the picking by the young evangelists I encountered at that critical time. I can remember experiencing genuine joy the moment I found I believed that despite the disappointments of my childhood I had a heavenly Father who had created me, devised a plan for my life, and – although he knew me intimately, faults and all – loved me unconditionally. I believed the Gospel message because I was primed for it since toddlerhood: I already knew that I was vile and unlovable, irredeemably broken. It was a small step to accept that I was in desperate need of a Saviour who could love me to wholeness. Christianity provided me with solace, comfort, and a powerful super-ally I could depend upon to help me make sense of a world where felt unaccepted and alone. I was just 19 when I converted. My new worldview came with a ready-made scaffold inside which I could build the safest of structures for myself, insulating me from the pain of the past, and rendering me unsusceptible to repeating the mistakes of my parents.
It is so hard to stick to just a few paragraphs. This is a very in-depth look.
However, learning to think, as it turns out, is a door that, once opened, cannot easily be shut. My faith began to erode as I gave voice to doctrinal difficulties and real-life concerns that had lain buried in some dark recess of my mind. I was further provoked by the many questions with which my now-thinking teenagers would pepper me. Then, when our family went through several back-to-back traumas that caused most of our Christian friends to drop us like warm dog shit, I started to realise that life wasn’t all that much tougher without them. Indeed, I was beginning to think that I actually had been managing more or less solo all along. I started to wonder whether those seemingly authentic, emotionally powerful ‘spiritual’ encounters with the Deity had been fabrications borne of my own desirous state of mind. Had any of it been real? The piercing glimmer of suspicion that I had fallen victim to a spiritual sleight of hand began to peep through fissures forming in the carefully constructed shell of my religious delusion. Little by little those tiny cracks widened and bright reason began to flood in.
She found out that "you let your kids – and even yourself – loose in the wide-open space of Freethinking at your peril."
I am not an atheist, not totally sure what I would call myself at this point in my life.
However, I think her blog captured my feelings because I know what it feels to be part of a church all your life and have to leave because your mind and logic require it. It's painful.
The Southern Baptist church where I grew up, and my children were raised called me unpatriotic when I openly argued that Iraq was NOT a holy war. They have continued going backwards, even calling contraception a form of murder....but I could not go backwards with them.
I often look back at what an obnoxiously holier than thou kid I was.
Last year I wrote about what a surprise it was to me when I first starting reading and posting at Democratic forums around 2002 and 2003.
I remember being surprised and fascinated at the open-mindedness here over almost all topics. I am afraid that often in my postings then there was a bit of the superiority often felt here by the religious community in which I had grown up. They really instilled in me that we were the only ones on the road to salvation and that our goodness would prevail over most anything. I remember when I was 13 telling a father of one of my friends that he would have no place in heaven unless he repented and got saved.
Fortunately with my intelligent, liberal minded parents and my education at a small liberal arts university I overcame that...thank goodness. I must have been an obnoxious young teen.
The main topics when I came were 9/11 and the Iraq invasion...I can never call it a war. I never will. We invaded a country based on lies.
..."I would read things and there would be a light bulb going on in my head. I would say to myself hey that is what I believe is true. I would wonder why I never read about any of this stuff in the newspapers. I was often out of my depth and probably thought of as arrogant in topics of tolerance of others. I was learning new things....., and my mind was taking it all in. I became less tolerant of who I had been and was more liberal every day.
I notice in the writing of Jane Douglas the same thing I felt, though our situations were different. There must be a period of insecurity and perhaps alienation from old friends.
Not long after hubby and I removed our names from the church roll in 2003, our neighbors began putting up yard signs that said they supported the president and the war. By that time I had accepted that some of them would never do anything but accept that the war was righteous and holy.
My appreciation and good thoughts to Jane Douglas and her blog.